Available:*
Library | Item Barcode | Call Number | Material Type | Item Category 1 | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... | 30000010028867 | PG5039.21.U6 I45 1991 | Open Access Book | Creative Book | Searching... |
Searching... | 30000010028866 | PG5039.21.U6 I45 1991 | Open Access Book | Creative Book | Searching... |
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Summary
Summary
From the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, this is a comic vision of our anxiety about immortality.
Author Notes
One of the foremost contemporary Czech writers, Kundera is a novelist, poet, and playwright. His play The Keeper of the Keys, produced in Czechoslovakia in 1962, has long been performed in a dozen countries. His first novel, The Joke (1967), is a biting satire on the political atmosphere in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. It tells the story of a young Communist whose life is ruined because of a minor indiscretion: writing a postcard to his girlfriend in which he mocks her political fervor.The Joke has been translated into a dozen languages and was made into a film, which Kundera wrote and directed. His novel Life Is Elsewhere won the 1973 Prix de Medicis for the best foreign novel. Kundera has been living in France since 1975. His books, for a long time suppressed in his native country, are once again published.The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), won him international fame and was a successful English-language film. In this work Kundera moves toward more universal and philosophically tinged themes, thus transforming himself from a political dissident into a writer of international significance.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews 2
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kundera (whose novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being has sold more than 600,000 copies in paperback) offers brilliant meditations on 20th-century life as he contrasts a comic love triangle involving Goethe with a modern-day trio of fictional Parisians. This BOMC selection spent 12 weeks on PW 's hardcover bestseller list. $100,000 ad/promo. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Choice Review
In his latest novel Kundera explores "immortality," characterized as image, celebrity, or fame extended and magnified in death, and so, paradoxically, of vital concern to the living ego. Himself a character as novelist/narrator, Kundera creates characters before our eyes, probing beneath their surfaces to reveal complex and ambiguous motives. These are further illuminated by reference to the relationship between Goethe and Bettina von Arnim. Readers of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) will recognize the style and voice of Kundera's bemused intellectual narrator whose insights into modern life provoke the sad but wry laughter of recognition. But more than in any of his previous books, Kundera plays postmodern tricks, interweaving fiction and reality. He explicitly discusses the act of creating a novel, while at the same time his friend Professor Avenarius becomes involved in the lives of his characters, presenting one of the novel's characters with a diploma declaring him a complete ass, having an affair with another, and slashing the tires of a third. The novelist himself meets and talks with some of his characters. Immortality, like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, transcends its plot. Highly recommended.-S. F. Klepetar, St. Cloud State University
