Milan Kundera

This article is more than 15 years old

(1929- )

1929-

"A person who writes books is either all (a single universe for himself and everyone else) or nothing. And since all will never be given to anyone, every one of us who writes is nothing..."

Birthplace

Brno, Czechoslovakia

Education

Charles University, Prague (philosophy); Prague Film Faculty

Other jobs

Labourer, jazz musician, professor of world literature

Did you know?

He was expelled from the Communist Party for dangerous opinions not once, but twice.

Critical verdict

Despite the political ramifications of his writing - Kundera's first novel, The Joke, in which a flippant scrawl of "Long live Trotsky!" ruins the hero's life, caused him to lose his citizenship - Kundera has always insisted that the novel must be "autonomous", independent of politics. His complex meditations on personal freedoms and identity were subtle commentaries on the eastern European situation; since the fall of Communism, he has become more interested in writing about literature itself. Now living in France, he wrote Slowness directly into French.

Recommended works

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Kundera weaves together sex, politics and philosophy with a seen-it-all cynicism that nevertheless manages to be rather uplifting.

Influences

Kundera calls Bohumil Hrabal, author of the tragicomic I Served the King of England - Czech history through the eyes of a small libidinous waiter - "our very best writer today".

Now read on

Ivan Klima, a more obviously politicised Czech writer, is similarly concerned with personal freedom. Hungarian Peter Nadas's heavyweight A Book of Memories combines political affairs and affairs of the heart.

Adaptations

Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), with Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche, catches Kundera's combination of substance and style. The Joke was filmed in Czechoslovakia (and, like the book, banned).

Criticism

In The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed Kundera celebrates the role of the author, with essays on Kafka, Flaubert and Rabelais. Milan Kundera and the Art of Fiction (ed Aron Aji) includes essays by Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes.