2023-07-12 12:27:03
There was a time, in the Europe of the end of the last century, in which the sense of morality of the liberal and creative classes was marked by the novels of Milan Kundera: humanist skepticism against strong thinking, ironic individualism against an invasive us, hooligan jokes borrowed from the counterculture, the discovery of sexuality as a new form of intimate communication between people, joking contempt and refuge in the old beaux-arts aesthetics and European cosmopolitanism… “Optimism is the opium of the people! Any healthy atmosphere stinks! Long live Trotsky!”, wrote Kundera at the key point of The Joke, his first novel (1968) and in those three sentences, which, in effect, were a joke leading to tragedyI already announced all his literature. Kunder (Brno, 1929) died on Tuesday, July 11, at the age of 94 in Paris, the city that welcomed him in 1975, when the Czechoslovak government sent him into exile.
The joke in La joke (published by Tusquets, like all Kundera) was a matter of love and politics because its author, Ludvik Jahn, was a Czech student, virtuous militant of the Communist Party, who in his courtship to Marketa, his intended, sent him some humorous notes in which he intended to present himself as a rebel: “Long live Trotsky!”. Unfortunately, Marketa, the beautiful Marketa, was a woman whose main characteristic was the absence of a sense of humor and That made Ludvik’s prank fall into the wrong hands.. Then, the good communist began his fall from grace, a succession of self-critical sessions that, step by step, became a ceremony of absurd theater.
Kunder He has insisted many times that the absurdity of his books talks about love and sex, not about communism, but it was always difficult to get away from political reading. By age, the Czech writer had to experience the de-Stalinization of his country in his twenties and spend the Prague Spring at the age of 39. He entered the university and was expelled. He employed himself in manual labor and wandered on the outskirts of the culture of his country. That was a less closed world than it might seem: there was some access, limited but fascinated, to French avant-garde philosophy and literature and to jazz and there was an opportunity to rediscover the Czech artistic tradition before the war and socialism: modernist poetry, the fairytale architecture of Prague, the German literature of Kafka, a taboo in the Socialist Republic.
That breeding ground can be understood very well in La vida está en el otro parte (1973), the book by the unforgettable Jaromil who discovered Kunder to the western public. Jaromil was another humorless character, a child poet raised by his mother to be the Arthur Rimbaud of the Czech language, of the new generation. Everything went wrong, of course: the Communist Party confined the mother and son couple to a miserable room in their bourgeois house, Jaromil’s classmates laughed at his presumptions and the discovery of love and sex went against the mother’s hateful project from Jaromil. The joke, again, took the path of tragedy.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), Kundera’s next important book, was a set of stories in which, paradoxically, there was so much political Time.news of the disenchantment of 68 czechoslovakia, as of exploration in that almost magical absurdity. Those were the years of the Latin American Boom and Kundera, already in exile, had connected with his time.
Until your time was time Kunder. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) was the novel of that year throughout Europe and the most complex expression of Kundera’s literature. What a time when the best sellers began as a small essay on Nietzsche and on the eternal return: “If the French Revolution were to repeat itself eternally, French historiography would be less proud of Robespierre.. But since it speaks of something that will never happen again, the bloody years become mere words, theories, discussions, they become lighter than a feather, they are not scary,” Kundera wrote in the opening lines of The Unbearable lightness.
In those lines was the classic Kunder joker and debunker but also maverick. Two pages later, the writer introduced the heroes of his novel: “I saw him [a Toms] standing by the window of his apartment, looking across the courtyard at the wall of the building opposite, not knowing what to do. Teresa was first met about three weeks ago in a small Czech town. They spent barely an hour together. She accompanied him to the station and waited with him until he caught the train. Ten days later he came to see him in Prague. They made love that same day. At night she got a fever and he stayed with the flu for a whole week at her house.”
The prose is clear, the characters are defined by their actions, the landscape has something cold. Tomás and Teresa are in the memory of any reader of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, no matter how many years have passed, they are a myth of true but unhappy, contradictory and partly self-destructive love. Tomás was a charming and intelligent man but also a womanizer and Teresa, the critical conscience of the novel, tried to understand why. Why was he a narcissist? Because in the intimacy of lovers did he find a space of morality into which hateful political commissars and kitsch sentimentality could not enter? Because it was his way of hurting himself?
The Unbearable Lightness of Being was both an erotic and philosophical novel and a memoir without emphasis or drama of the spring of 1968 in Prague, of the Soviet invasion. It arrived in the same year as The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, and between the two books it was defined a form of solitary, ironic and apolitical rebellion typical of the end of the last century.
After The Unbearable Lightness of Being and one more book of stories (Immortality), Kunder he abandoned the Czech language for French and began the second half of his career. In those years, the world he had mocked, that of the popular republics of Eastern Europe, broke up, and his Western hosts looked to him for a guide with which to understand that moment.
His response was to rebel against that demand and to write in an increasingly abstract plane about human nature. Immortality, for example, was an essay on the body expressed in a succession of more or less impressionistic vignettes. Only in ignorance, Kunder I addressed the trauma of two Czech exiles who were facing their return home and found in sex, of course, a way to make sense of their melancholy.
That novel came in 2009. Kunder He kept writing until 2013 and then his voice faded. Since he did not give interviews, we will never know if he felt a bit anachronistic in the last decade of his life, in the years when the world returned to emphasis and moralism. If his readers forgot, they owe him reparation.
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