Milan Kundera's 'remarkable' work explored oppression, inhumanity – and the absurdity of being human
Retrieved on:
Thursday, July 13, 2023
Prague, Joke, Uncertainty, Nobel Prize, Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Book, The Art of the Novel, The Festival of Insignificance, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Religion, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Life, Poetry, Communist party, Atmosphere, Culture, Laughter, Politics, Anxiety, Teaching, Immortality, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Jerusalem Prize, Woman, Robin, Human, Herder Prize, Materiality, History, Essay, Language, Achievement, Unbearable, Thought, Totalitarianism, Sentimentality, Masculinity, Ajax, Ethics, Collection, Art, Communism, Kundera, Achilles, Curtain, Prague Spring, Reading, Logic, Political lists, Nobel, Knowledge, Laurence Sterne, Unbearable Lightness, Recurrence, Imagination, Bird, Opinion, Entertainment, Film industry, Literature, Czechoslovakia, Ignorance
It feels too soon, perhaps because in everything he wrote, he opened up new ways of thinking, writing and reading.
Key Points:
- It feels too soon, perhaps because in everything he wrote, he opened up new ways of thinking, writing and reading.
- From the start, he was exposed to, and immersed in, the absurdity of human culture.
- He grew up in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, then lived under Stalinist rule, where he was an active member of the Communist Party.
- I have been reading him, quoting him and teaching from his writings for decades, after bumping into his work in 1988.
Interrogating totalitarianism, with humour
- But in each novel, Kundera offers some humour – often bitter, but capable of leavening the otherwise bleak, and densely reported, content.
- But he also develops an erotic narrative that seems to suggest lighthearted sex can allow us to live fully in the moment.
- Weight and lightness, laughter and forgetting, repetition and change, politics and sex: his first four novels incorporate such dualities.
Author in exile
- In 1975, he fled his home for exile in France, and continued writing works of fiction that mostly followed the signature structure he first developed in The Joke: multi-part, multi-voiced novels, where the narrator interpolates critique, commentary and philosophical statements in the text.
- This makes for a restless story, one that shifts to and fro across locations, times and contexts.
- The focus of Kundera’s novels is their wrestle with questions of knowledge, the complexity of being and a constant uncertainty.
‘Things are not as simple as you think’
- In The Art of the Novel (1986), he outlines a history of how novelists unpacked various dimensions of existence.
- Homer never wondered whether, after all their many hand-to-hand battles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth.
- But for Don Quixote and Sancho teeth are a perpetual concern – hurting teeth, missing teeth.
- Homer never wondered whether, after all their many hand-to-hand battles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth.
Teller of inconvenient truths
- He won other prizes, after all, among them the Jerusalem Prize in 1985 and the Herder Prize in 2000.
- Perhaps it was his writing style that meant the Nobel committee saw him nominated on a number of occasions, but never awarded him the prize.
- Robin Ashenden suggests he “had become a teller of truths inconvenient to the modern age”, and maybe there is something in that.