2023-07-12 21:08:16
The novelist died Tuesday in Paris, at the age of 94. He leaves behind a work imbued with a biting humour.
Born on April 1st, is it a coincidence or a destiny? Long before becoming one of the most widely read novelists in the world, Milan Kundera had already announced his favorite theme with a first novel called The Joke and a first collection, Risibles Amours. Of his last novel written in Czechoslovakia (La Valse aux adieux, 1976), he said that “all the narration is placed on the thin border which separates the serious from the non-serious”, and therefore that it was necessarily his favorite novel. His exile in France was to give international repercussions to this subtle game, declined in elegant, falsely political, slightly pretentious novels that were to hypnotize an entire generation. It can be confusing to read them again today, with their female characters often ridiculed, if not despised.
The global success of the film based on his best-known novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Philip Kaufman, owes much to the elevation of the woman (masterfully played by Juliette Binoche) from the page to the screen. The writer also got so angry with the film that he no longer gave any permission to adapt his books. To the question that Liberation asked him for the special issue “Why do you write?”, He therefore answered in all transparency: “Writing is the pleasure of contradicting, the happiness of being alone against everyone, the joy of provoking one’s enemies and irritating one’s friends.” Mission accomplished, therefore, as his scathing humor did not pass through his finally liberated native country, any more than his ambiguous activities during the Soviet occupation. In his adopted country, his latest works, although written in French, were greeted with polite indifference, as the somewhat forced jokes of April 1st often are. Nevertheless: Milan Kundera defined an era, which many novelists of his generation failed to do.
#life #Liberation