The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves—all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.
The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, for more than twenty years.
He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, The Farewell Party, The Books of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves — all originally written in Czech.
Like Slowness, his two earlier nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.
Biography
For someone whom the world regards as a serious intellectual, Milan Kundera has a brilliantly twisted sense of humor. His novels depict a world of awkward orgies and disastrous pool parties, mad scientists and self-pitying poets who contract pneumonia out of spite. While Kundera's works tackle profound issues of human identity, they also playfully juggle ambiguities, ironies and paradoxes. "The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question," he said in a 1980 interview with Philip Roth. "There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead."
Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovkia in 1929. Like many young Czechs who had come of age during World War II and the German occupation, Kundera was attracted to Marxist philosophy, which seemed to promise a new freedom and peace. The first literary works he produced (three volumes of poetry and a play, The Owners of the Keys) were essentially Communist propaganda, though they didn't always conform to the tenets of socialist realism approved by the state. His resistance to the official restrictions on literature helped lead to his involvement with the "Prague Spring," the brief-lived reform movement toward "socialism with a human face."
During the '60s, Kundera began writing short stories, collected as Laughable Loves, which he would later identify as the beginning of his mature work. In several of them, jokes that start out as innocent pranks evolve into catastrophes for both perpetrator and victim -- they are deeds that, like the Czech version of Communism, have escaped the control of their creators. Kundera's first novel, The Joke, concerns a young man who is brought up on political charges after sending a teasing postcard to his girlfriend ("Optimism is the opium of the people!").
The Joke was published to wide acclaim shortly before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Following the invasion, Kundera was ousted from his film-studies teaching job, his books were pulled from libraries and bookstores, and he was forbidden to publish new work. He went on writing, however, and his novels Life Is Elsewhere and The Farewell Party were published outside his native country. Farcical and bleak, the novels developed what would become a recurring theme for Kundera, in which commitment to an abstract moral principle paves the way for corruption and evil.
In 1975, Kundera fled Czechoslovakia and settled in France, where he eventually became a citizen. His first book produced in exile, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, remains one of his most celebrated works, weaving together autobiographical reflections with a series of connected fictions. John Updike, writing in the New York Times, called it "brilliant and original, written with a purity and wit that invite us directly in; it is also strange, with a strangeness that locks us out." His next novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, also drew high praise, and the 1988 film version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche turned Kundera into something of a celebrity.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the political pressures that shaped his early life and works, Kundera has long insisted that the novel should be a work of art, not a political or ideological statement. By the '90s, Kundera had started to write his novels in French; he is now sometimes tagged a "Franco-Czech" author. His works are often described as "novels of ideas," but he resists the term "philosophical novel." As he said in an interview with Lois Oppenheim, "There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize."
发表于2024-12-25
Life Is Elsewhere 2024 pdf epub mobi 电子书
年少时总喜欢引用些看似深意却一知半解的句子,比如“生活在别处”。直至在图书馆偶遇米兰昆德拉的这本同名小说,才有机会探索其背后的哲思。 一、自由在别处 母亲这个意象在昆德拉笔下往往代表着控制与束缚,在《不能承受的生命之轻》中,特丽莎的母亲粗...
评分读的米兰昆德拉的第二部作品,《生命不能承受之轻》是在书城里面站在读了几天读完的。这个作品是在手机上读完的。 生活在别处,让我想起了去年买的一本书——《活在当下》,那本书是看了几页就没有看下去了,给我感觉是心灵鸡汤类似的书籍。 还是来说说这本书吧,首先从书名开...
评分 评分陆陆续续地读完《生活在别处》,在作者的文字中,我看到了人性的思考,爱的追求,冰冷的幽默…… ,即使我还是那样的肤浅。 感触可以是复杂的变化着的,在我的内心中,隐隐地激荡着那沉闷的海潮声,像是神灵在召唤。无论是畸形的母爱,抑或放荡却沉重的恋情,都充斥着我的脑...
评分98年的北京,那时候我还在迷笛音乐学校上学。为了逃避冬天宿舍里阴冷的气温,我经常跑到京客隆二楼图书角翻上几本杂书看看。有一次在一个不起眼而的架子上无意间发现了一本叫《生活在别处》的小说,我承认当时自己只是被书的名字所吸引了,但那种诡异的驱使性却尤为强烈的让我...
图书标签: MilanKundera 小说 米兰・昆德拉 昆德拉 捷克 外国文学 生活在别处 Kundera
The author initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent ("innocence with its bloody smile"!), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He's no creep, he's Rimbaud. Rimbaud entrapped by the communist revolution, entrapped in a somber farce.
只是随便在图书馆拿起的一本小说,但读起来经常有会心一笑的感觉,对人物心理细致的描写令人着迷,喜欢这种感性体验多过逻辑思考的书...很多经典句子已经记不清,但读的时候一度有一种感觉:文学可能比科学更接近真理或者那不变的永恒,当然这样的比较也可能是武断且无意义的,尤其是看了其他人的评论后,发现不是每个人都有类似的人生体验,他们会觉得主人公是无病呻吟.
评分4.5 ingeniously written. if "the joke" is weighed down by a rock, "life is elsewhere" is carried by wings. nonetheless, wings create no less troubles than a rock. 爱上昆德拉,下一本读laughable loves
评分1/5/2009
评分英文版就是能学不少挺文艺的词汇……
评分太对胃口了!
Life Is Elsewhere 2024 pdf epub mobi 电子书