Unbearable Lightness of Being author Milan Kundera dies

Milan Kundera, the ­author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being whose dark, provocative novels delved into the enigma of the human condition, has died at the age of 94.

Czech writer Milan Kundera has died, aged 94. Picture: AFP

Milan Kundera, the ­author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being whose dark, provocative novels delved into the enigma of the human condition, has died at the age of 94.

Kundera died at his apartment in Paris, France, his adoptive country where he had lived since his emigration from communist-ruled Czechoslovakia in 1975.

“Not only Czech literature, but world literature as well has lost one of the greatest contemporary writers, and one of the most translated writers too,” Tomas Kubicek, director of the Kundera library, told the public Czech TV.

Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said Kundera was able to “appeal to whole generations of readers across all continents” with his work.

Kundera was frequently touted as a favourite to win the Nobel Prize for literature, but he never claimed the coveted honour.

Through his characteristic satire and poetic prose, Kundera had sought to express all that is compelling and absurd about life, drawing on his own experiences of being stripped of his Czech ­nationality for dissent.

Kundera’s first novel, The Joke, a work of dark humour about the one-party state published in 1967, led to a ban on his writing in Czechoslovakia while also making him famous in his homeland.

In 1975, he and his wife Vera went into exile in France, where he worked for four years as an assistant professor at the University of Rennes. They were stripped of their Czech nationality in 1979.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche in the film version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

In his adopted home, where he became a citizen in 1981, his reputation and success grew as translations of his novels appeared, such as Life is Elsewhere (1973) set in Czechoslovakia about a poet entrapped by the communist ­regime.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) playfully explored through seven interlinked narratives the nature of forgetting in politics, history and daily life.

The novel was “brilliant and original”, said the New York Times in 1980, “written with a ­purity and wit that invite us ­directly in; it is also strange, with a strangeness that locks us out.”

By far his most famous work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was published in 1984 and turned into a film starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis in 1987.

The novel is a morality tale about freedom and passion, on both an individual and collective level, set against the Prague Spring and its aftermath in exile.

AFP