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About the book:
A darkly comic novel set over five days at a Czech spa town, in which a jazz musician tries to prevent a woman he impregnated from having his child and a series of coincidences spiral toward an unexpectedly grave conclusion. Lighter in tone than Kundera's major works but no less precise in its thinking about desire, mortality, and the absurdity of human arrangements.
One of his most purely enjoyable books.
Good secondhand condition.
Some wear on cover.
Inscription on inner front cover.
Brown duct tape repairing a tear on the inner front cover - discounted accordingly.
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About the author:
Milan Kundera (1929 to 2023)
Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, into a musical household his father was a pianist and musicologist Kundera came to fiction with a composer's preoccupation with structure, theme, and counterpoint. He was an early Communist Party member, expelled twice, and the Soviet invasion that crushed the Prague Spring in 1968 was the event that shaped everything: his books were banned, he lost his teaching position, and in 1975 he emigrated to France, where he eventually wrote in French and became a citizen. He spent the rest of his life in Paris, increasingly reclusive and controlling of his own legacy.
His project, sustained across fifty years, was to establish the novel as a distinct form of knowledge capable of holding ambiguity, irony, and contradiction in ways that philosophy and ideology cannot. The novels themselves are structured like musical compositions, with movements and motifs rather than conventional chapters, and they digress freely into philosophical meditation without apology. He traced the novel's origins to Cervantes and Rabelais, and his deepest formal debts are to Sterne, Diderot, Musil, and Broch the tradition of the essay-novel that thinks as it tells.
The recurring preoccupations: lightness against weight, forgetting against memory, the individual crushed or liberated by history, and kitsch his term for the sentimental refusal to acknowledge the full complexity of human experience, the "categorical agreement with being." He considered kitsch the aesthetic face of totalitarianism. Nietzsche's eternal return runs through The Unbearable Lightness of Being like a structural beam.
His major works include The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality. The Art of the Novel is essential reading on what fiction is for. Philip Roth was a close friend and champion; Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and most contemporary novelists working in the register of ideas carry his influence.
He died in Paris in July 2023.
