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.
雅羅米爾,這個詩意的名字,這個矛盾的混閤體!他讓我心心念念想著,難以忘懷. 在他身上體現著平凡人的偉大,天纔的寂寞,他是眾生的標本,仿佛也是我的化身. 幸福的童年。 精心設計的教育方式+天賦過人+毫無保留對他投注的母愛+優越的傢境成就瞭一...
評分讀完昆德拉德的書,我總是情不自禁的對書的題目感觸非常,以緻於讀過之後我總是就書題目而産生齣許多感慨。慚愧的是,所思所想多數已經背離瞭原著,成為瞭我心中獨立的部分。但是,這或許也是我衷愛昆德拉德一點原因吧。 讀《生活在彆處》 親愛的朋友,不知道你可否思考...
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 評分讀完昆德拉德的書,我總是情不自禁的對書的題目感觸非常,以緻於讀過之後我總是就書題目而産生齣許多感慨。慚愧的是,所思所想多數已經背離瞭原著,成為瞭我心中獨立的部分。但是,這或許也是我衷愛昆德拉德一點原因吧。 讀《生活在彆處》 親愛的朋友,不知道你可否思考...
warped oedipus complex. lyricism as essential to revolution
评分英文版封麵真好看
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
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
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