Eternal candidate for the Nobel Prize, Milan Kundera “He died at noon on Tuesday, July 11, 2023,” his publisher, Gallimard, said in a statement.
A sarcastic portrayer of the human condition, Kundera is part of a small line of writers, such as the Russian Vladimir Nabokov, who decided to switch languages in the middle of his literary career.
Marked by the communist totalitarianism that subjugated his country for a good part of the 20th century, Kundera began his literary career with a collection of poems in Czech, man is my garden.
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Born on April 1, 1929 in Brno, the second largest Czech city, Milan Kundera published his revelation novel in 1967, The joke.
He was stripped of his Czech nationality after falling out of favor with his country’s authorities during the prague springthe 1968 reform movement militarily crushed by the Soviet Union.
He adopted French nationality in 1981 and did not regain his Czech nationality until 2019.
He is one of the few living writers to be included in Gallimard’s prestigious literary collection La Pléiade.
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The novel that established him internationally was The Unbearable Lightness of Beingpublished in 1984, a sarcastic portrait of the human condition and one of the most influential contemporary novels.
The work opens with a harrowing scene in which Soviet tanks advance through Prague, the Czech capital and which was the writer’s home until he moved to France in 1975. KunderAlternating themes of love and exile, politics and the deeply personal, garnered critical favor and won him a wide readership among Westerners who appreciated both his anti-Soviet subversion and the intertwined eroticism in many of his works.
The novel was made into a movie in 1988 directed by Philip Kaufman, starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis.
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His books also include Immortality, The Book of Ridiculous Loves, The Book of Laughter and Oblivion, Ignorance, Life is Elsewhere, The Farewell, The Feast of Ignorance y The Betrayed Wills.
A quote, taken from book of laughter and obliviondice: “He erased her from the photograph of his life, not because he hadn’t loved her, but precisely because he loved her.. He erased her along with the love he felt for her. People shout that they want to create a better future, but that is not true, the future is an indifferent void that does not interest anyone, while the past is full of life and its face excites us, irritates us, offends us and for that we want to destroy or retouch”.
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And he adds: “Men they want to own the future just so they can change the past. They struggle to enter the laboratory where photographs are touched up and biographies and history are rewritten.”
FM JL