《참을 수 없는 존재의 가벼움》은 프랑스로 망명한 체코 출신의 작가인 밀란 쿤데라가 1984년에 발표한 소설이다. 성적으로 자유분방한 의사 토마시, 토마시의 아내인 테레자, 예술가이자 토마시의 연인인 사비나, 교수인 프란츠를 주인공으로 하며 1968년 프라하의 봄을 배경으로 한 연애 소설이다. 이 소설은 1982년부터 쓰여졌지만 쿤데라는 2년 후에 프랑스어로 먼저 출판하였으며 1985년에 체코어로 출판하였다. 1988년에는 영화 《프라하의 봄》으로 제작된 바 …
In one of the finer modern ironies of the life-imitates-art sort, the country that Kundera seemed to be writing about when he talked about Czechoslovakia is, thanks to the latest political redefinitions, no longer precisely there. This kind of disappearance and reappearance is, partly, what Kundera explores in The …
Immortality is a novel in seven parts, written by Milan Kundera in 1988 in Czech. First published 1990 in French. English edition 345 p., translation by Peter Kussi. This novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman, seemingly to her swimming instructor. Immortality is the last of a trilogy that includes The Book Of …
Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road--only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a …
Identity is a novel by Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera, published in 1998. It is possibly his most traditional novel in terms of narrative structure. It's also one of his shortest novels. The phrase "masturbating fetus" appears to have been coined in this novel.
A New York Times Notable Book Irena and Josef meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier. 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 …
The author initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, 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. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made …
Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than two …
The Farewell Waltz is a Czech-language novel by Milan Kundera published in 1972. A French edition was published in 1976 and an English version entitled The Farewell Party. This novel mostly deals with love, hate and accidents between eight characters who are drawn together in a small spa town in Czechoslovakia in …