Milan Kundera was a writer whose work is celebrated for its profound philosophical explorations and unique literary style. He wrote in both Czech and French, considering his self-revised French editions to be original creations rather than translations. His novels delve into the complexities of human existence, identity, and the absurdities of life, often touching upon themes of exile and memory. Kundera's distinct voice blends intellectual rigor with a captivating narrative approach, making his writing resonate deeply with readers.
Jacques and His Master is a deliciously witty and entertaining play by Milan Kundera, the acclaimed Franco-Czech author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.A highly original variation on Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot's novel Jacques le Fataliste, Jacques and His Master has been successfully staged all over the world. This new translation by Simon Callow has been authorized by Kundera as the definitive edition.
A provocative and rousing essay collection from one of Europe's greatest living writers
This is the first novel by the author of "Immortality", which won "The Independent" Award for Foreign Fiction in 1991. Milan Kundera is also the author of "The Book of Laughter and Fogetting".
Perhaps the most ambitious novel from one of Mexico's greatest writers, the narrative covers 20 centuries of European and American culture, and prominently features the construction of El Escorial by Philip II. The title is Latin for "Our earth". Modeled on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Terra Nostra shifts unpredictably between the sixteenth century and the twentieth, seeking the roots of contemporary Latin American society in the struggle between the conquistadors and indigenous Americans. -Terra Nostra is the spreading out of the novel, the exploration of its possibilities, the voyage to the edge of what only a novelist can see and say.- Milan Kundera
A modern classic, "Immortality" is "ingenious, witty, provocative, and formidably intelligent, both a pleasure and a challenge to the reader" ("Washington Post Book World").
Kundera's essay has been written like a novel. In the course of nine separate sections, the same characters meet and cross paths with each other. Stravinsky and Kafka with their odd friends Ansermet and Brod; Hemingway with his biographer; Janácek with his little nation; and Rabelais with his heirs - the great novelists. In the light of their wisdom this book examines some of the great situations of our time. The moral trial of the twentieth century's art, from Celine to Mayakovsky; the passage of time which blurs the boundaries between the 'I' of the present day and the 'I' of the past; modesty as an essential concept in an age based on the individual and indiscretion which, as it becomes the habit and the norm, heralds the twilight of individualism; the testaments, the betrayed testaments - of Europe, of art, of the art of the novel and of artists.
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.
In this first work of nonfiction, Milan Kundera offers a "practitioner's confession" on the art of the novel. "Every novelist's work contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel, an idea of what the novel is," Kundrea writes. "I have tried to express here the idea of the novel that is inherent in my own novels." Kundrea brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on "perhaps the least known of all the great novelists of our time," Herman Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. Kundrea'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. His reflections on the state of the modern European novel in an era of "terminal paradoxes" are as witty, original, and far-reaching as his unique fiction.
"A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world," writes Milan Kundera in The Curtain, his fascinating new book on the art of the novel. "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." For Kundera, that 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. In this entertaining and always stimulating essay, Kundera cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. Too often, he suggests, a novel is thought about only within the confines of the language and nation of its origin, when in fact the novel's development has always occurred across borders: Laurence Sterne learned from Rabelais, Henry Fielding from Cervantes, Joyce from Flaubert, García Márquez from Kafka. The real work of a novel is not bound up in the specifics of any one language: what makes a novel matter is its ability to reveal some previously unknown aspect of our existence. In The Curtain, Kundera skillfully describes how the best novels do just that.
A young Czech whose mother has molded him into a poet becomes the people's literary hero during a Communist rally in 1948
