"One can never know what one should want, because one can only live once, and one cannot compare it with a previous life or correct it in the next. ”
- Milan Kundera in "The Unbearable Lightness of Life"
"It's a world where it's fashionable to leave, but we're not good at saying goodbye. ”
- Milan Kundera in "Living Elsewhere"
On July 11, local time, the well-known European writer Milan Kundera died at the age of 94. Shortly after verifying Kundera's death, the French newspaper Le Monde published an article commemorating Kundera on its official website on the 12th local time, written by Martine Boyer-Weinmann, a professor at the Department of French Literature at the University of Lyon II, France.
Milan Kundera was a "novelist" (Romancier) rather than a "writer" (écrivain) because he saw the novel as a real "call to thought" (appel de la pensée), as a comprehensive, aesthetic, and non-theoretical means. In his 1993 masterpiece of literary theory, Les testaments trahis, he described the novel as "an attitude, an intellect, a stance that excludes identification with any kind of thing, such as politics, religion, ideology, morality, collectivity, etc."
From Cervantes to Carlos Fuentes, from Goethe to Diderot, from Kafka to Musier, Kundera has always belonged to his beloved "world literature", and his art of fiction sharply questions various place-based interests and temporality. In 1988, when Salman Rushdie was in crisis with his Satanic Verses, Kundera gave him a lot of support, constantly reminding people of the importance and urgency of defending the novel.
Every year when the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded, Milan Kundera and Haruki Murakami are often regarded by the public as the "pearls" of the Nobel Prize. Although he did not win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Milan Kundera's literary achievements have long been recognized around the world.
At the end of the last century, Milan Kundera became well-known for his works such as "The Unbearable Lightness of Life", which set off "Kundera fever" again and again in many countries. Kundera himself has won several international literary prizes. In 2011, Kundera's collection was featured in the "Seven Stars Library" of the French publishing house Galimard, becoming the only living writer to be selected. In 2020, Kundera was awarded the Kafka Prize for Literature, another major award after the Jerusalem Prize, the Austrian National Prize for European Literature, and the Czech State Prize for Literature.
Today, let's review Milan Kundera's classic works, and let the anchor accompany you to listen to these stories in the rest of your reading life...
Milan Kundera's classic recommendation
The Unbearable Lightness of Life
The novel relies on the historical upheaval of Czechoslovakia in the sixties of the twentieth century, and unfolds the story with the accidental and fatalistic love of Thomas and Teresa as the main line, not only describing the emotional entanglement of several pairs of men and women, nor is it just writing about the ups and downs of personal fate in the great changes of circumstances, and the choice of individuals at the moment of change, but also a philosophical novel with rich layers and complex imagery. He put forward the theory of relativity between the lightness and the weight of life, and between the spirit and the flesh. This book is also a world-renowned super bestseller,
Ignorance
The work tells the story of Czechs in exile in the West who return to their homeland to find their roots, but experience the process of confusion, disappointment and self-search in the huge gap between reality. tells the story of the heroine who has been in exile for 20 years and returns to her native Czech Republic, and meets an old acquaintance at the Paris airport on the way home, but this is not what it used to be, and the interrupted story is always difficult to continue, and it is always difficult to return.
"Slow"
This is Milan Kundera's first novel written in French after emigrating to France, and it is a perfect blend of fiction and reality, past and present. In the novel, the author and his wife Vera go to a castle that has been converted into a hotel for a weekend, and while driving down the road, a motorcycle sps by, causing the author to think about speed. In doing so, he recalls the story of the noblewoman and the young knight in the 18th-century French writer Viven Dennon's novel Tomorrow Will Not Come Again. Linked to this is a night of absurdity for a group of moderns: one day in the 20th century, a group of entomologists gathered at the Château Hotel for a seminar, staging one ridiculous farce after another.
The Art of the Novel
This book is the epitome of Kundera's aesthetics of fiction, through which we can understand his artistic views, style, techniques, and his attitude towards writing, his understanding of literary tradition, and the thoughts on people and the world behind this attitude, which is the best answer to the existential value of fiction. Where do novels come from?Why do people like novels?How does reading novels help our lives?In this book, Milan Kundera begins with Don Quixote stepping out of the house, describing the changes of the novel and the spiritual comfort it brings to mankind, and then expresses the wisdom of the novel.
"Laughing and Forgetting"
This is Milan Kundera's first novel after emigrating to France, and it is one of his most stylized of all his works. The main character of the novel, Tamina, is from Prague and works as a hostess in a small café in a city in western Europe. She did everything she could to get back the eleven notebooks and letters she had left at her mother-in-law's house in Prague, and the past became her salvation. And Mirek, who wants to go back to the love letters of twenty-five years ago, is also learning how Xi resist his own forgetting. The novel not only shows what people want to remember or forget, but also explores the relationship between laughter and forgetting.
"Living Elsewhere"
It is a novel of "critical poetry" that exposes the lyrical mask on which humanity depends. The hero of the story, Jaromir, is a weak, sensitive, delicate, and shy poet. When he was young, he was nurtured by his mother to become a little poet who was willing to show off and was too idealistic. In his youth, he enthusiastically devoted himself to poetry, love, and revolution, longing to break free from the shackles of authoritarian maternal love, and strive to realize his mature charm and sublime majesty. When revolution clashed with love, he degenerated from an imaginative and passionate poet into a despicable informer, mercilessly depriving his lover of his freedom. Soon after, he contracted pneumonia due to freezing and died curled up in his mother's arms.