We cannot leave this world without having paid a humble tribute to Milan Kundera the author of ” The Unbearable Lightness of Being “, a writer of an exceptional dimension died Monday at the age of 94 in Paris.
Born in 1929, he had left his native Czechoslovakia for France where six years later he was naturalized and where he lived until his death. He had never felt the need to return to his country. He had started his writing career in 1967 almost jokingly by publishing his first novel in Prague “Joke“.
Translated into French a year later, it was interpreted, “Spring of Prague“ obliges, from a political reading with regard to the events told which had preceded the entry of Russian tanks into the “Czechoslovak” capital. Kundera was so exasperated that he later took over the French translations of his first novels himself in order to give them the same authenticity as the Czech versions.
For Kundera this “joke” was neither more nor less “what a love story” and his other novels, “attempts to clarify a confused world“. He will say about I have always, deeply, violently, hated those who want to find an attitude (political, philosophical, religious, etc.) in a work of art, instead of looking for an intention to know, to understand, to grasp this or that such aspect of reality “.
His works combine philosophy, fiction, love and time, humor and fantasy. In Kundera’s productions, there is no place for any work. The irony with which he flirts without moderation is not to be outdone, through it he will try to destabilize all certainty. In Czech it is a whole fresco translated through languages in the four corners of the world, The joke, Laughable loves, Life is elsewhere, The farewell waltz, The book of laughter and oblivion, The unbearable lightness of being And Immortality.
The rest of his works written in French suffer no comparison either. Works like Slowness, ignorance, identity Or The feast of insignificance, … are as “light” as his pen and smile at the things of life by asking questions about everything and nothing and trying to answer them. The specific color of his humor or the “non-serious”, he imbued it with Rabelais, Diderot, Cervantes, Gombrowicz, Sterne, Kafka… so many essential references for him. But let it be said! His books all have something that belongs only to them, they combine counterpoint and the search for balance.