He had an excellent present for subversive humor. In “The Joke,” for instance, a lady tries to kill herself by ingesting painkillers, solely to search out they had been laxatives. Kundera’s humor had a deeper function. It was usually irreverent and mocking; it had an underground high quality, and it sprang from his innate mistrust of authority.
“I learned the value of humor during the time of Stalinist terror,” he advised Philip Roth in a 1980 interview that ran in The New York Times Book Review. “I was 20 then. I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn’t fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humor was a trustworthy sign of recognition.”
The Communist authorities in Czechoslovakia, till the Velvet Revolution in 1989, banned Kundera’s books. He went into exile in France in 1975, and exile of varied kinds was amongst his abiding themes. He finally noticed himself as a French author.
Kundera’s novels usually felt essayistic; they had been about no matter was on his thoughts: nostalgia, the absurdity of absolutes, music. Often sufficient although, what was on his thoughts was intercourse. Jonathan Rosen, in a 2015 piece for The Atlantic, recalled studying “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” in highschool, writing that the novel “featured orgies the way ‘Pride and Prejudice’ featured dinner parties.”
In that very same novel, nevertheless, Kundera displayed his tactile and philosophical curiosity in reminiscence, in what stays. Of Tamina, who can not recall her lifeless husband’s face, he writes:
She developed her personal particular strategy of calling him to thoughts. Whenever she sat throughout from a person, she would use his head as a type of sculptor’s armature. She would focus all her consideration on him and transform his face inside her head, darkening the complexion, including freckles and warts, cutting down the ears, and coloring the eyes blue. But all her efforts solely went to point out that her husband’s picture had disappeared for good.
Kundera noticed intercourse as an act of redemption and of liberation beneath repressive regimes, however his obsession got here again to hang-out him. Critics more and more got here to see his males as creepy womanizers. Geoff Dyer in contrast Kundera’s novels to the slapstick burlesque of “The Benny Hill Show,” with “the nurse in her bra and panties getting chased around by these horny doctors.”
Source: www.nytimes.com