François Ricard Books

A model of clarity, grace, and intelligence, François Ricard's book joins the great French tradition of the literary essay as a meditation on the writing of Milan Kundera. Agnès's Final Afternoon imitates the protagonist of Kundera's novel Immortality on the last afternoon of her life. Like all readers of fiction, Agnès steps out of her car -- out of the world of planned routes, responsibilities, and social self -- and gives herself up to the discovery of a new landscape, an experience that will transform her. François Ricard's essay enters into the writings of Milan Kundera in much the same way. The landscape he explores includes a chain of ten novels, composed between 1959 and 1999, and two books containing one of the most lucid reflections on the novel. From The Joke to Ignorance, Ricard uncovers the richness of theme and character in the novels, their structural composition, polyphony of voices, and innovations of form and subject matter that stretch the boundaries of the novel to a breaking point. Readers need not be familiar with all of Milan Kundera's oeuvre to appreciate this unusual and original book. Agnès's Final Afternoon will inspire a sense of wonder and lead you to appreciate the beauty and profundity of Kundera's art.

This highly original book imitates the protagonist, Agnès, of Kundera's novel Immortality. Like all readers of fiction, when Agnès steps out of the car, she steps out of the world of planned routes, responsibilities, and social self, and gives herself up to the discovery of a new landscape, an experience that will transform her. François Ricard's beautiful essay enters into the writings of Milan Kundera in much the same way. The landscape he explores in Agnès's Final Afternoon includes a chain of ten novels, composed between 1959 and 1999; he takes us through the themes and characters of the novels, their structural composition, and innovations of form and content that stretch the boundaries of the novel to breaking point.François Ricard is a Professor of French Literature at McGill University. He has been writing about the work of Milan Kundera for fifteen years.

A novel, divided into seven parts and exploring immortality. This is the author's seventh novel. His previous works include The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He has written one play, Jacques and his Master.

In this novel - a story of irreconcilable loves and infidelities - Milan Kundera addresses himself to the nature of twentieth-century 'Being' In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. We feel, says the novelist, 'the unbearable lightness of being' - not only as the consequence of our private acts but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.Juxtaposing Prague, Geneva, Thailand and the United States, this masterly novel encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, and embraces, it seems, all aspects of human existence. It offers a wide range of brilliant and amusing philosophical speculations and it descants on a variety of styles.

Laughable loves is a collection of stories that first appeared in print in Prague before 1968, but then was banned. The seven stories are all concerned with love, or rather with the complex erotic games and strategems employed by women and especially men as they try to come to terms with needs ad impulses that can start a terrifying train of events. Sexual attraction is shown as a game that often turns sour, an experience that brings with it painful insisghts and releases uncertainty, panic, vanity and a constant need for reassurance.

A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier when they chose to become exiles. 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?

From one of the most distinguished writers of modern times comes a libertine fantasy which is also a profound meditation on contemporary life. Ruminating on how the pleasures of slowness have disappeared in today's fast-paced, future-shocked world, Kundera explores the secret bond between slowness and memory and the connection between our era's desire to forget and the ways in which we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed.

Das beeindruckende Porträt eines modernen Klassikers: Der 1929 in Brünn geborene und heute in Paris lebende Milan Kundera ist mit Romanen wie „Der Scherz“ und „Die unerträgliche Leichtigkeit des Seins“ in alle Weltsprachen übersetzt worden und zählt zu den bedeutendsten Romanciers der Gegenwart. Der kanadische Literaturwissenschaftler und Essayist Francois Ricard stellt Kunderas gesamtes Schaffen dar, von seinen Anfängen in der Tschechoslowakei bis zu den großen Werken, die er als Exilant in Frankreich verfasste. Ricard untersucht Kunderas Stellung im modernen Roman und folgt ihm von seinen politischen Motiven bis zu seiner Erforschung von Liebe und Unsterblichkeit.

Znamenitá a úspěšná dramatizace Diderotova Jakuba Fatalisty, hravá i krutá studie proměn lidského osudu v neprohlédnutelném světě, je jediný autorův dramatický text patřící k dílům, která „má bez výhrad rád a chce vydávat“.