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."
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.
謊言是個不經心的藉口,在書的中期,詩人在店外等候的在路途跟蹤的在窗外偷窺著的的分明是另一個女人,可是當他下體那另一個生靈蘇醒的時候,他卻掩蓋瞭事實順從瞭紅發女人,他順著她的提問一步步騙她,他告訴她他愛她他想得到她一如她想得到他。這個謊言一直持續到結尾也沒能...
評分我站在山腰上,下麵是許多擺放錯亂的絞刑架。 我抱著一本詩,有滑稽的封麵和可笑的句子,關於這點,我可以嚮全國人民擔保,但請你們不要笑。 這個星球屬於某大型礦業公司,而我是一個被流放於此的監工,抱著本詩的監工。 太陽是紫色的,土地是赤色的。很明顯,我是淡綠色的...
評分讀米蘭·昆德拉最大的睏難之一在於,很難琢磨透作者究竟想錶達什麼樣的思想,作者對他筆下的人物,究竟是贊揚、諷刺、否定還是隻是純粹的描寫生活本身的種種狀態。與一般的小說相比米蘭·昆德拉的故事並不復雜,沒有史詩般氣魄雄渾的場麵,沒有亂紛紛你方唱罷我登場的層齣...
評分接前文:http://book.douban.com/review/5860914/ 雅羅米爾的故事快講完瞭,這位四十來歲的男人纔剛剛齣現。 昆德拉說:“跟米雷剋相反,《生活在彆處》中那位四十來歲的享樂主義人物則堅持他‘非命運的田園牧歌’。實際上,一個享樂主義者拒絕將他的生活變為命運。命運吸乾...
評分讀的米蘭昆德拉的第二部作品,《生命不能承受之輕》是在書城裏麵站在讀瞭幾天讀完的。這個作品是在手機上讀完的。 生活在彆處,讓我想起瞭去年買的一本書——《活在當下》,那本書是看瞭幾頁就沒有看下去瞭,給我感覺是心靈雞湯類似的書籍。 還是來說說這本書吧,首先從書名開...
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. 愛上昆德拉,下一本讀laughable loves
评分讀的好桑心
评分5分中的4分都可以打給結尾。。斷斷續續終於讀完,不知道說什麼好,隻是so sad...so sad... 3.6.15-4.4.15
评分The excessive narcissism of the anti-hero permeates the narrator’s voice, which proves that he is no better than whom he mocks and detests. The plot design is also astonishingly naive and crude, with redundancy and an abominable amount of egocentrism. Basically plodded through the book with distress.
评分warped oedipus complex. lyricism as essential to revolution
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