Showing results by author "Milan Kundera" in All Categories

“A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.” In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on...

Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the listener follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than 200 years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic.

Milan Kundera's brilliant collection of essays is a passionate defence of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and ideas that characterises his best-selling novels, the internationally acclaimed author revisits the artists whose works help us better understand what it means to be human. Elegant, startlingly original, and provocative, Encounter combines many of the author's signature themes with personal reflections and stories.

Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realism - that's The Festival of Insignificance. Listeners who know Kundera's earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the "unserious" in a novel is not at all unexpected of him.

In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening and entertaining essay on the art of the novel, renowned author Milan Kundera suggests that 'the curtain' represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has - a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides. Here an incomparable literary artist cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization.

A budding poet and his adoring mother are the central characters of this intriguing early novel by Milan Kundera. He takes us through the young man's fantasies and love affairs in a characteristic tour de force, alive with wit, eroticism and ideas.

"Suppose que tu rencontres un fou qui affirme qu'il est un poisson et que nous sommes tous des poissons. Vas-tu te disputer avec lui ? Vas-tu te déshabiller devant lui pour lui montrer que tu n'as pas de nageoires ? Vas-tu lui dire en face ce que tu penses ?" Son frère se taisait, et Édouard poursuivit : "Si tu ne lui disais que la vérité, que ce que tu penses vraiment de lui, ça voudrait dire que tu consens à avoir une discussion sérieuse avec un fou et que tu es toi-même fou.

In a moment of historic threat and uncertainty in mainland Europe, this collection, makes the case for the 'small countries' of Central Europe as the nucleus of European values and a lightning rod for its potential dangers, where language and culture play an active role in affirming national identity and democracy is under continued threat from the threat of Russian oppression. However, these countries have been historically overlooked by the major powers of Western Europe.

All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favour of valuing the book (and all Kundera's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.

“I can’t imagine reading this book without being challenged and instructed, amused, amazed and aroused, and ultimately delighted.” —John Simon, New York Times Book Review Milan Kundera’s brilliant collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer...

There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognise the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is erased while we simultaneously doubt our own. This 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 this 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 postpsychological novel.

A deliciously witty and entertaining ""variation"" on Diderot's novel Jacques le Fatalist, written for Milan Kundera's ""private pleasure"" in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. When the ""heavy Russian irrationality"" fell on Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera explains, he felt...

Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.

Ein erfolgreicher Arzt und Frauenheld trifft ein unbedarftes Mädchen aus der Provinz - so begegnen sich Tomas und Teresa 1968 in Prag. Er lebt seine amourösen Abenteuer aus, sie sucht bei ihm die eine große Liebe und reagiert verletzt und eifersüchtig. Dennoch werden sie ein Paar. Doch mit dem Ende des Prager Frühlings verändert sich ihr Leben dramatisch.

Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analysed and experienced.

Irena and Josef meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence 'their memories no longer match'.

Jacques and His Master is a deliciously witty and entertaining 'variation' on Diderot's novel Jacques le Fataliste, written for Milan Kundera's 'private pleasure' in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. When the 'heavy Russian irrationality' fell on Czechoslovakia he felt drawn to the spirit of the eighteenth century - 'And it seemed to me that nowhere was it to be found more densely concentrated than in that banquet of intelligence, humour and fantasy, Jacques le Fataliste'.

In this dark farce of a novel, set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance. Perhaps the most brilliantly plotted and entertaining of Milan Kundera's novels, Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy. Written in Bohemia in 1969-70, this book was first published in 1976. This beautiful new translation, made from the French text prepared by the novelist himself, fully reflects his own tone and intentions.

Si tratta sempre di amore, in queste storie. Ma un amore a cui si accompagna ogni volta la mistificazione, con effetto deflagrante. Il mondo va felicemente in pezzi sotto i nostri occhi, frantumato dalla duplice spinta dell’eros e della mistificazione. E l’essenza amorosa, nella sua leggerezza e nel suo pathos, si sprigiona finalmente, come liberata da una costrizione.