| One of my favourite authors so far. I like him much more than U. Eco (if we consider those two as a representatives of postmodernism). If someone would ask me: "Oh I can´t imagine postmodernism art" I guess I will say: "just read Immortality by M. Kundera". <- little glorification in the start, hope you don´t mind. Facts: - born in April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia - Kundera has written in both Czech and French (nowadays - since 2000 - he don´t translate into Czech anymore). He revises the French translations of all his books; these therefore are not considered translations but original works. Due to censorship by the Communist government of Czechoslovakia, his books were banned from his native country, and that remained the case until the downfall of this government in the Velvet Revolution in 1989 - His father, Ludvík Kundera (1891-1971), once a pupil of the composer Leoš Janáček, was an important Czech musicologist and pianist who served as the head of the Janáček Music Academy in Brno from 1948 to 1961. Kundera has a pasion for music too and it´s often said you can "see" music in his art (movement of verses in poetry or structure of sentences in novels). Works: The Joke The Book of Laughter and Forgetting The Unbearable Lightness of Being The Immortality The Farewell Waltz The Art of the Novel but he has also written poetry (I suggest you "Man: A Wide Garden" lion work for someone so young - released in 1953) (c) Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milan_Kundera Few ideas (PART I) about The Immortality which I consider most complex (I guess my favourite book of all times): Immortality. A piece which only name can be interesting, because it describes one of the phoenix that, thought it´s unreachable, go along with mankind since the beginning. The novel is devided into seven chapters (which Kundera himself, remembering the musical art of his father, Ludvik Kundera, contradistinguish in terms of movement and method of narration. But all the pieces in the end make a perfect mosaic) and is somehow different from other Kundera´s works - it´s wholly "Frenchy". No Czech protagonist and no Czech realia. It´s also last Novel he wrote in Czech (Le Lenteur, and everything after that, was written in French only). I would like to write about this post-modern piece (which is as well one of my favourite books). "When I finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being in December 1982, I got a strong feeling, that something has definitely ended: that I will never continue with the theme of modern czech history." Those are words of Kundera from the addition of the Immortality - his next novel (he started with writing in the summer 1987 and finished it in December 1988 in Reykjavík). To read Immortality means to interpret Kundera otherwise, much clearly, objectively. And I guess it´s because of the absence of Czech influence, which are quite problematic to understand properly (I mean communist era). At the end of the czech publication of the book are: 1) translated article written by Phillipp Sollerse "How the devil leads the ball", which was originally published in Nouvel Observateur. Sollers emphasises Kundera´s effort to make progress, to try create something new, to abandon his sureness. Sollers literally says: "He (Kundera) send all cliches to hell". Kundera said (though he often says he don´t like to describe his own works) there were two main themes in the novel: "1) Affinity of man and his image 2) homo sentimentalis" - I guess those themes are quite connected and prompt us to the authors view of the world as a one big theatre. It´s amazing, that Kundera through his art, make the reader to think - not only in theory but interrogatively with help of irony and model situations. |
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