Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera (born 1929), Czechoslovakia, France.

Milan Kundera is probably the best-known Czech writer in the world today, although he now evidently writes in French. After studying art and then film he taught “world literature” in Prague for several years but was“banned” after the Soviet occupation in 1969 (a topic raised in The Unbearable Lightness of Being). Heleft Czechoslovakia for France, eventually taking up residence in Paris; his Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979. He has published a great deal of lyric and long poetry and several plays, butis best known in the West for his novels, beginning with Žert (The Joke) in 1967. His prose is marked by an interest in humiliation, eroticism, and always potentially ironic narrative philosophizing and (professorial!) pontification.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being was a big literary hit in the West and was made into a successful film. Please note that Kundera’s last name (like all Czech words) should be stressed on the first syllable.

Course book: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, translated by Michael Henry Heim.

Questions for reading:

• Can you tell whether this novel was written “at home” or “abroad,” and what are the implications for the reader in judging or absorbing information conveyed about life in Czechoslovakia in and after 1968?
• How do you as a reader react to the narrator’s personality and digressions, as distinct from those of the characters?
• How much does Kundera lead or allow us to sympathize with his characters? Does his narrator’s repeated mention of this or that character’s origin in a rumbling stomach, or something similarly prosaic, tempt the reader to acscribe the characters’ qualities or behaviors to the author, or does he succeed in making us like and care for the them?
• In general, how does Kundera’s “baring of devices,” to use a term from the Russian Formalists, impact the reader? How does the narrative structure of the book influence our perception of its plot as well as our emotional reactions?
• If you have seen the movie version, how does it influence your reading? If you haven’t seen the movie, what do you expect, as you begin to read, from the book’s cover image and title?
• How do Kundera’s presentations of sex, eroticism, and gender relations compare to those in the other books we have read so far?
• How does art function in the story? How does medicine?

Other books by Kundera:

• The Art of the Novel, translated by Linda Asher (from French), 1988, available in Tripod.
• Kniha smíchu a zapomnění, 1979. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, translated by Michael Henry Heim, 1980, available in Tripod.
• Valčík na rozloučenou, 1976. The Farewell Party, translated by Peter Kussl, 1976, available in Tripod.
• l’Identité, 1998. Identity, translated by Linda Asher (from French), 1998, available in Tripod.
• l’Ignorance, 2000. Ignorance, translated by Linda Asher (from French), 2002, available in Tripod.
• Nesmrtelnost, 1990. Immortality, translated by Peter Kussl, 1991, available in Tripod.
• Jacques et son maître, 1975. Jacques and His Master: An Hommage to Diderot in Three Acts, translated by Michael Henry Heim, 1985, available in Tripod.
• Žert, 1967. The Joke, translated by Michael Henry Heim, 1982, available in Tripod.
• Život je jinde, 1973. Life is Elsewhere, translated by Aaron Asher (from French), 1976.
• La Lenteur, 1993. Slowness, translated by Linda Asher (from French), 1996, available in Tripod.
• Les testaments trahis, 1993. Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, translated by Linda Asher (from French), 1995, available in Tripod.

Works about Kundera:

• Maria Němcová Banerjee. Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera, available in Tripod.
• Hana Píchová. The Art of Memory in Exile: Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera, available in Tripod.
• François Ricard. Agnès’s Final Afternoon: An Essay on the Work of Milan Kundera, available in Tripod.
• Tomislav Z. Longinović. Borderline Culture: The Politics of Identity in Four Twentieth-Century Slavic Novels, available in Tripod.

Web links about Kundera:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milan_Kundera

articles, picture, list of works

http://www.kundera.de/english/

A German site —- but in English

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_kundera.html

An interview with Lois Oppenheim

http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,,-99,00.html

A quick pop outline from The Guardian

http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/personal/reading/kundera-unbearable.html

Bob Corbett’s comments on The Unbearable Lightness of Being