[Hat tip: Commenter “Barry Meislin.”]
RIP Milan Kundera.
Long-time readers here probably recall that Kundera has been one of my favorite authors and almost certainly was my favorite living author, someone I’ve quoted time after time on this blog. You can find a list of these posts here; I highly recommend this one.
For me, Kundera defies description, but of course I’ll try to describe him. He was an expat Czech who had been a Communist in his youth but was a political changer. As a writer, he had one of the most distinctive “voices” ever, and that voice often stepped out of the storyline to make a point that was philosophical or historical or most likely both. Everything he wrote reflected the working of an unconventional mind and spirit, uncategorizable, playful, thoughtful, ironic, and deep.
I first read Kundera before he became famous, when excerpts from one of his works – The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – appeared in The New Yorker, which I used to read assiduously. I only had to read one or two paragraphs to realize that this was a writer like no other, someone who was going to matter to me in terms of the evolution of my thinking about life and about politics and history. And so it was.
This interesting profile of Kundera, who was an elusive guy, appears in – of all places – The New Republic. I think Kundera defied all attempts to explain him.
Here’s another profile of Kundera that’s worth reading, with this quote from a 1985 interview:
“For me, indiscretion is a capital sin. Anyone who reveals someone else’s intimate life deserves to be whipped. We live in an age when private life is being destroyed. The police destroy it in Communist countries, journalists threaten it in democratic countries, and little by little the people themselves lose their taste for private life and their sense of it,” he told the writer Olga Carlisle. “Life when one can’t hide from the eyes of others — that is hell.”
I’ll close with a couple of quotes from Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that I’ve used on this blog:
…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.
Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.
