There was a time, in the mid-1980s, when every well-read person had large-format paperbacks by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Milan Kundera on their bookshelves. Marquez won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982. The Czech writer, who died this week at the age of 94, somehow failed to take that award. Few other authors of his generation appeared so frequently among the bookies’ predictions.
No matter. The novels he wrote following exile to France-–notably The Book of Laughter and Forgetting from 1979 and The Unbearable Lightness of Being from 1982 – will forever satisfy those who like anthracite-black wit woven in with their philosophical fiction. The books indulge a strain of abstract thinking that has rarely been fashionable in Anglophone literary circles. There was also a sense of fun that, if the author himself is to be credited, sat uncomfortably with his adopted literary community.
“But it is an entertainment!,” he told the Paris Review in 1984. “I don’t understand the contempt that the French have for entertainment, why they are so ashamed of the word ‘divertissement.’ They run less risk of being entertaining than of being boring.” His books were never boring.
Born in Brno, his father a much-admired musicologist, Milan Kundera was of that generation who grew up with little memory of a democratic Czechoslovakia before the war. He was initially a supporter of the post-conflict regime. Kundera was expelled from the party as early as 1950, but, readmitted a few years later, still believed the system could be reformed from within. In 1970, two years after the Prague Spring, that famous attempt at “socialism with a human face”, he was expelled for good and struggled to find work before, his citizenship revoked, embarking for France.
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Always happy to frustrate expectations, Kundera insisted that he was now a French author and that his books should be catalogued accordingly. Most who savoured his golden run from The Joke in 1967 to Immortality in 1988 will politely regard him as an exemplar of the Czech imagination. And a citizen of the world.
