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.
谎言是个不经心的借口,在书的中期,诗人在店外等候的在路途跟踪的在窗外偷窥着的的分明是另一个女人,可是当他下体那另一个生灵苏醒的时候,他却掩盖了事实顺从了红发女人,他顺着她的提问一步步骗她,他告诉她他爱她他想得到她一如她想得到他。这个谎言一直持续到结尾也没能...
評分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...
評分 評分读米兰·昆德拉最大的困难之一在于,很难琢磨透作者究竟想表达什么样的思想,作者对他笔下的人物,究竟是赞扬、讽刺、否定还是只是纯粹的描写生活本身的种种状态。与一般的小说相比米兰·昆德拉的故事并不复杂,没有史诗般气魄雄浑的场面,没有乱纷纷你方唱罢我登场的层出...
評分英文版封麵真好看
评分扭麯的人。扭麯的故事。
评分隻是隨便在圖書館拿起的一本小說,但讀起來經常有會心一笑的感覺,對人物心理細緻的描寫令人著迷,喜歡這種感性體驗多過邏輯思考的書...很多經典句子已經記不清,但讀的時候一度有一種感覺:文學可能比科學更接近真理或者那不變的永恒,當然這樣的比較也可能是武斷且無意義的,尤其是看瞭其他人的評論後,發現不是每個人都有類似的人生體驗,他們會覺得主人公是無病呻吟.
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. 愛上昆德拉,下一本讀laughable loves
评分讀的好桑心
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