The Joke

Fiction
Translated by Michael Henry Heim
First published in English in 1969

‘It is impossible to do justice here to the subtleties, comedy and wisdom of this very beautiful novel.’ Salman Rushdie

All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, more than 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 favor of valuing the book (and all Milan Kundera’s work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.

Life Is Elsewhere

Fiction
Translated by Aaron Asher
First published in English in 1974

Milan Kundera initially intended to call this early novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to him, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. He takes us through the young man’s fantasies and love affairs in a characteristic tour de force, alive with wit, eroticism and ideas.

Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent (“innocence with its bloody smile”!), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He’s no creep, he’s Rimbaud. Rimbaud entrapped by the communist revolution, entrapped in a somber farce: an artist as a young man.

Laughable Loves

Fiction
Translated by Suzanne Rappaport
Firt published in 1974

Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise in this dazzling collection of stories, originally banned in 1968 Prague. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road – only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds.

In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone home to his wife. Games, fantasies, and schemes abound in all the stories while different characters react in varying ways to the sudden release of erotic impulses.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Fiction
Translated by Aaron Asher
First published in English in 1980

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage, leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought, the interior of a single, unique situation the understanding of which recedes from my sight into the distance.

It is a book about laughter and forgetting, about forgetting and about Prague, about Prague and about the angels.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Fiction
Translated by Michael Henry Heim
First published in English in 1984

‘Shamelessly clever . . . Exhilaratingly subversive and funny.’ Independent

A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon; a man torn between his love for her and his womanising. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals; while her other lover stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by choices and events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance and weight – and we feel ‘the unbearable lightness of being’.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being encompasses passion and philosophy, infidelity and ideas, the Prague Spring and modern America, political acts and private desires, comedy and tragedy – in fact, all of human existence.

The Art of the Novel

Non-fiction
First published in English in 1988

In seven independent, but closely related chapters, Milan Kundera presents his personal conception of the European novel, which he describes as ‘an art born of the laughter of God’.

‘Invigoratingly suggestive . . . Kundera’s map of the development of the European novel is outlined with the reckless brevity of the man who knows exactly what and where the salient points are.’ London Review of Books

Testaments Betrayed

Non-fiction
First published in English in 1995

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.

Ignorance

Fiction
Translated by Linda Asher
First published in English in 2002

A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty 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?

The truth is that after such a long absence ‘their memories no longer match.’ We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion as the memory records only ‘an insignificant, minuscule particle’ of the past, ‘and no one knows why it’s this bit and not any other bit.’ We live our lives sunk in a vast forgetting, and we refuse to see it. Only those who return after twenty years, like Ulysses returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance first-hand.

Milan Kundera has taken these dizzying concepts of absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transformed them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.

Encounter: Essays

Non-fiction
First published in English in 2010

With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterises his novels he illuminates the art and artists who remain important to him and whose work helps us better understand the world. An astute and brilliant reader of fiction, Kundera applies these same gifts to the reading of Francis Bacon’s paintings, Leos Janácek’s music, the films of Federico Fellini, as well as to the novels of Philip Roth, Dostoyevsky, and García Márquez, among others. He also takes up the challenge of restoring to their rightful place the work of major writers like Anatole France and Curzio Malaparte who have fallen into obscurity.

Milan Kundera’s signature themes of memory and forgetting, the experience of exile, and his spirited championing of modernist art mark these essays. Art, he argues, is what we have to cleave to in the face of evil, against the expression of the darker side of human nature.

The Festival of Insignificance

Fiction
Translated by Linda Asher
First published in English in 2015

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. Readers 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 Immortality, Goethe and Hemingway stroll through several chapters together talking and laughing. And in Slowness, Vera, the author’s wife, says to her husband: ‘you’ve often told me you meant to write a book one day that would have not a single serious word in it . . . I warn you: watch out. Your enemies are lying in wait.’

Now, far from watching out, Kundera is finally and fully realising his old aesthetic dream in this novel that we could easily view as a summation of his whole work. A strange sort of summation. Strange sort of epilogue. Strange sort of laughter, inspired by our time, which is comical because it has lost all sense of humour. What more can we say? Nothing. Just read.