LThe announcement of the disappearance was made on Czech television this morning. Milan Kundera died in Paris, in his homeland of choice, at the age of 94.
Milan Kundera, the author of the The unbearable lightness of being
Milan Kundera has written 10 novels of which six are in Czech and four are in French. The first, The jokehad been published in 1967 and had been put banned in Czechoslovakia following the end of the “Prague Spring” which Kundera bluntly supported. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) is instead the novel for which his Czechoslovakian nationality had been deprived.
He moved to Paris in ’75, he had the French nationality since 81. His most famous novel is The unbearable lightness of being, originally written in Czech but first published in France in 1984 (Only in 2006 Kundera had authorized its publication in the Czech Republic). One of the best-selling books in the history of the Adelphi publishing house, is set in Prague circa 1968 and tells the story of four characters, two men and two women, linked by different love affairs. A book that is a generational manifesto for the way personal aspirations and most intimate impulses are frustrated by external conditioningespecially social and political.
epa000424938 Czech writer Milan Kundera, one of the alive authors more important and awarded in Europe, posing two days before the launching in Spain of his new book ‘Curtain’, an essay where Kundera asks himself about creation, history, moral, lack of certainty and Europe, on Monday 02 May 2005, in Madrid, Spain. EPA/-
Kundera’s name had been mentioned for years when the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded.
Milan Kundera, 10 quotes to find out or reread it
As always, the day after the death of a great author, the race to discover and rediscover him starts today. We begin with these ten quotations, both serious and mild at the same time. Because, as he confessed: «My life’s ambition is combine the seriousness of the questions with the lightness of the form».
1. Right at the beginning of Genesis it is written that God created man to give him dominion over birds, fish and animals. Of course Genesis was written by a man and not a horse (The unbearable lightness of being).
2. Really serious questions are only those that a child can ask. These are questions for which there is no answer. (The unbearable lightness of being)
3. In physics class, any student can prove the accuracy of a scientific hypothesis with experiments. Man, on the other hand, living only one life, has no possibility of verifying a hypothesis by experiment, and therefore he will never know whether or not he should have listened to his feelings. (The unbearable lightness of being)
4. Kitsch causes two tears of emotion to appear one after the other. The first tear says: How beautiful are children running on the grass! The second tear says: How good it is to be moved together with all mankind at the sight of children running on the lawn. […] The real antagonist of totalitarian kitsch is the man who asks questions. A question is like a knife that cuts through the canvas of a painted backdrop to allow us to take a look at what is hidden behind it. (The unbearable lightness of being).
Women, love, the struggle for power
5. Sadness was the form and happiness the content. (The unbearable lightness of being)
6. Love is by definition an undeserved gift; indeed, being loved without merit is the proof of true love […] How much more beautiful it is to hear: I’m crazy about you even though you are neither intelligent nor honest, even though you are a liar, selfish and a scoundrel! (The slowness)
7. I loathe people who feel a feeling of brotherhood because they have discovered the same baseness in each other. It’s a slimy brotherhood that I don’t aspire to. (The joke)
8. Man’s struggle against power is the struggle of memory against oblivion (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)
9. Women don’t look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. (The Waltz of Farewells)
10 But pain will not listen to reason, because pain has its own reason which is not reasonable. (identity)
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