One possible answer to the title question is because he was born on April Fools’ Day—I mean, how cool is that for a dissident writer! Born in 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera has lived as an exile in France since 1975 after frequent political skirmishes with Communist authorities that resulted in his work being banned in the country. Perhaps best known for his novels, he is also a poet, playwright, essayist, and has written several collections of short stories.

He reached international fame as a writer with his most popular works including The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being inspired by the Prague Spring of 1968, a brief period of political liberalization in  Czechoslovakia. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times, but has yet to win. In 2019, his Czech citizenship was restored and the following year he was awarded the prestigious Franz Kafka prize by his native country.

Kundera, however, cannot be positioned only in the political aspect of literary creativity: he mastered “the art of the novel,” polyphony, and farce to perfection. He wrote essays and plays. He meditated on how his works should be perceived, and that it is not advisable to read novels only as psychological manifestations.

But seriously, though, why read Kundera? For those of us who flatter ourselves by thinking we belong to the non-conformist camp, Kundera's witty experimental style gives us some of that rebellious woomf enriched by inimitable irony, metaphysical reflections, and philosophical mind games. We read Kundera because we want to be Kundera, or perhaps, because we were Kundera at some point of our lives. Each of Milan Kundera's books is a personal experience. We read them because we do not want to be told what to do—because we despise being told what to do.

Fiction

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The absurdities of modern life are dramatized by a student who forsakes physical love for a conversation with poets about it and a former Czech Communist leader who is officially eliminated from history.

 

 

 

 

 

The Festival of Insignificance

An ode to friendship set in present-day Paris follows the long-running discourse among four companions on sex, desire, history, art, and the meaning of human existence.

 

 

 

 

 

Identity

There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognize the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is erased while we simultaneously doubt our own. That also happens with couples—indeed, above all with couples, because lovers fear more than anything else "losing sight" of the loved one. With stunning artfulness in expanding and playing variations on the meaningful moment, Milan Kundera has made this situation— and the vague sense of panic it inspires—the very fabric of his new novel. Here brevity goes hand in hand with intensity, and a moment of bewilderment marks the start of a labyrinthine journey during which the reader repeatedly crosses the border between the real and the unreal, between what occurs in the world outside and what the mind creates in its solitude.

 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover: these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.

 

Nonfiction

The Art of the Novel

Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the post-psychological novel.

 

 

 

The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts

Traces the author's personal view of the history and significance of the novel in western civilization, arguing that a novel's development crosses international and language boundaries while serving to reveal previously unknown aspects of a reader's existence.

 

 

 

 

Encounter

A collection of essays from the Franco-Czech novelist provides a defense for art during an era that he says no longer puts value on art or beauty and discusses works and artists that are important to him.

 

 

 

 

 

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Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.