Search results for ""Author Milan Kundera""

The bestselling masterpiece tale of love and exile in Prague by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being.'An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.' Salman RushdieA 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.

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The New York Times bestseller by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being.'An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.' Salman RushdieKundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnès becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.

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Befriend a budding poet and his adoring mother in this seductive early novel - winner of the Prix Médicis - by the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.'An artist, clearly one of the greatest to be found everywhere.' Salman RushdieMilan 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.

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The first novel by author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being, of which Salman Rushdie wrote: 'It is impossible to do justice here to the subtleties, comedy and wisdom of this very beautiful novel.'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.

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