Milan Kundera – författare

När det kalla kriget var som allra kyligast påminde Milan Kundera oss om att Prag och Budapest var lika europeiska som Paris och Wien. Kunderas essä blev starten på en återupptäckt av Europa bortom järnridån.

Om författarenMilan Kundera föddes i Tjeckien. Sedan 1975 är han bosatt i Frankrike.

All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera ''s work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.

The present edition provides English-language readers an important further means toward revaluation of The Joke. For reasons he describes in his Author''s Note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating (with the assistance of his American publisher-editor) a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also to the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel''s narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.

When The Unbearable Lightness of Being was first published in English, it was hailed as ""a work of the boldest mastery, originality, and richness"" by critic Elizabeth Hardwick and named one of the best books of 1984 by the New York Times Book Review. It went on to win the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and quickly became an international bestseller. Twenty years later, the novel has established itself as a modern classic. To commemorate the anniversary of its first English-language publication, HarperCollins is proud to offer a special hardcover edition.

A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover -- these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel.

Controlled by day, Tereza''s jealousy awakens by night, transformed into ineffably sad death-dreams, while Tomas, a successful surgeon, alternates loving devotion to the dependent Tereza with the ardent pursuit of other women. Sabina, an independent, free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals -- of parents, husband, country, love itself -- whereas her lover, the intellectual Franz, loses all because of his earnest goodness and fidelity.

In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel, says the novelist, ""the unbearable lightness of being"" -- not only as the consequence of our private acts but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.

This magnificent novel encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, and embraces, it seems, all aspects of human existence. It juxtaposes geographically distant places (Prague, Geneva, Paris, Thailand, the United States, a forlorn Bohemian village); brilliant and playful reflections (on ""eternal return,"" on kitsch, on man and animals -- Tomas and Tereza have a beloved doe named Karenin); and a variety of styles (from the farcical to the elegiac) to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world''s truly great writers.

""An absolutely dazzling entertainment. . . . Arousing on every level—political, erotic, intellectual, and above all, humorous."" —Newsweek

""The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography. It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius."" —New York Times

Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range,The Book of Laughter and Forgettingis the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.

New York Times Bestseller

""Inspired. . . . Kundera''s most brilliantly imagined novel. . . . A book that entrances, beguiles and charms us from first page to last.""—Cleveland Plain Dealer

Milan Kundera''s sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert''s Emma or Tolstoy''s Anna, Kundera''s Agns becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera''s supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.

""An intellectual heavyweight and a pure literary virtuoso, Milan Kundera takes some of Freud''s most cherished complexes and irreverently whirls them about in acts of legerdemain that capture our darkest, deepest human passions. . . . The tales in Laughable Loves surprise and illuminate. . . . Kundera''s world is complex, full of mockeries and paradoxes. Life is often brutal and humiliating; it is often blasphemous, funny, irritating."" —Cleveland Plain Dealer

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 devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone home to his wife. Games, fantasies, and schemes abound in all the stories while different characters react in varying ways to the sudden release of erotic impulses.

""Irresistible. . . . Slowness is an ode to sensuous leisure, to the enjoyment of pleasure rather than just the search for it."" —Mirabella

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 hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic.

Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era''s desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about ""dancers"" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy.