A selection of key works by the Czech writer Milan Kundera, who passed away on July 12, 2023.
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‘The Joke’ (1967)
In his first novel Kundera wrote of his problems with the authorities, weaving a story full of dark humour that was published during the ideological detente before the Prague Spring.
It both sealed his fate with the authorities, who would later strip him of his citizenship, and made him famous within Czechoslovakia.
‘Life is Elsewhere’ (1969)
Internationally praised but unpublished in the Czech Republic until 2016, Kundera’s second novel tells the story of a young poet who fails to break free from his adoring mother and dies an absurd death.
Humorously exploring the hopes and fantasies of youth through his protagonist, who seeks his freedom through art and revolution, Kundera saw parallels with his own evolution from poetry to the existential novel.
‘Farewell Waltz’ (1972)
Considered by some critics as Kundera’s lightest and most playful major novel, this sexual farce with political overtones, set in a spa town, follows jazz musician Kilma, who pays dearly after a one-night-stand.
Also read | A bearable lightness
‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ (1984)
Kundera’s most famous novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is a morality tale about freedom and passion, on both an individual and collective level, set against the Prague Spring and its aftermath in exile.
It was turned into a movie starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day Lewis, and earned Kundera a worldwide following.
‘Slowness’ (1995)
After discovering with horror the liberties taken by the French translation of “The Joke”, Kundera devotes much of his time to revising his translated works.
“Slowness”, the first in a cycle of four novels all short and very dark and written directly in French, causes a stir in literary circles as it praises slowness over what Kundera charges as the West’s obsession with speed.
It raises Kundera’s status worldwide while also bringing him his first seriously bad reviews.
