Milan Kundera, a Communist Party outcast who turned a world literary star with mordant, sexually charged novels that captured the suffocating absurdity of life within the staff’ paradise of his native Czechoslovakia, died on Tuesday in Paris at age 94.
A spokeswoman for Gallimard, Mr. Kundera’s writer in France, stated on Wednesday that Mr. Kundera had died “after a prolonged illness.”
Mr. Kundera’s run of in style books started with “The Joke,” which was printed to acclaim through the Prague Spring of 1968, then banned with a vengeance after Soviet-led troops crushed that experiment in “socialism with a human face” just a few months later. He accomplished his closing novel, “The Festival of Insignificance” (2015), when he was in his mid-80s and residing comfortably in Paris.
The novel was his first new fiction since 2000, however its reception, tepid at greatest, was a far cry from the response to his most enduringly in style novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”
An instantaneous success when it was printed in 1984, “Unbearable Lightness” was reprinted over time in a minimum of two dozen languages. The novel drew even wider consideration when it was tailored right into a 1988 movie starring Daniel Day Lewis as one in every of its central characters, Tomas, a Czech surgeon who criticizes the Communist management and is consequently pressured to clean home windows for a residing.
As punishments go, washing home windows is a reasonably whole lot for Tomas: A relentless philanderer, he’s at all times open to assembly new ladies, together with bored housewives. But the intercourse, in addition to Tomas himself and the three different predominant characters — his spouse, a seductive painter and the painter’s lover — are there for a bigger goal. In placing the novel on its listing of greatest books of 1984, The New York Times Book Review noticed that “this writer’s real business is to find images for the disastrous history of his country in his lifetime.”
“He uses the four pitilessly, setting each pair against the other as opposites in every way, to describe a world in which choice is exhausted and people simply cannot find a way to express their humanity.”
He could possibly be particularly pitiless in his use of feminine characters; a lot in order that the British feminist Joan Smith, in her 1989 e book “Misogynies,” declared that “hostility is the common factor in all Kundera’s writing about women.”
Other critics reckoned that exposing males’s horrible habits was a minimum of a part of his intent. Still, even the stronger ladies in Kundera’s books tended to be objectified, and the much less lucky have been generally victimized in disturbing element. (The narrator of his first novel, “The Joke,” vengefully seduces the spouse of an outdated enemy, slaps her round throughout intercourse, then says he doesn’t need her. The lady’s husband doesn’t care; he’s in love with a really cool graduate pupil. In a closing indignity, the distraught lady tries to kill herself with a fistful of tablets, which grow to be laxatives.)
Mr. Kundera’s concern that Czech tradition could possibly be erased by Stalinism — a lot as disgraced leaders have been airbrushed out of official images — was on the coronary heart of “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” which turned accessible in English in 1979.
It was not precisely what most Western readers would have anticipated of a “novel”: a sequence of seven tales, instructed as fiction, autobiography, philosophical hypothesis and far else. But Mr. Kundera known as it a novel nonetheless, and likened it to a set of Beethoven variations.
Writing in The Times Book Review in 1980, John Updike stated the e book “is 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.”
Mr. Kundera had a deep affinity for Central European thinkers and artists — Nietzsche, Kafka, the Viennese novelists Robert Musil and Hermann Broch, the Czech composer Jaroslav Janacek. Like Broch, he stated, he strove to find “that which the novel alone can discover,” together with what he known as “the truth of uncertainty.”
Constant Méheut contributed reporting.
Source: www.nytimes.com