At the beginning of the 1980s, two European novels by authors considered, until then, to be in the minority, achieved unexpected repercussions. First it was, in 1980, “The Name of the Rose” by Umberto Eco, and four years later “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”of Milan Kundera. The overwhelming sales success and the successive translations into different languages were not without consequences, both for its readers and for the industry and, naturally, for the subsequent work of Eco and Kundera themselves.
The cinema did not take long to appropriate both books in a way that could not be, due to the characteristics of both, more than superficial, just the shell, and compressed, of the arguments of one and the other. Jean-Jacques Annaud, starring Sean Connery, lured audiences in with the promise of a medieval crime thriller, almost in the style of Dan Brown’s future Renaissance fantasies with the Illuminati and Leonardo da Vinci.
Philip Kaufman, in his version of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, sold eroticism from the poster that showed his characters Sabina (half-naked Lena Olin), with Teresa (Juliette Binoche) and Tomás (Daniel Day Lewis). Viewing the film corroborated these suspicions: none of the eroticism of the book, the eroticism of Kundera’s literature, had been embodied in those images.
Secluded from the public gaze a decade ago (and semi-recluse, in general, since long before, since the last interviews he gave were with the appearance of the aforementioned novel), he died yesterday at the age of 94, in his Paris by adoption, Milan Kundera. And, although he no longer wrote, his disappearance continues to open, ever more deeply, the gap between the last century and the present. It seems ironic that one of his latest titles is called “La lentitude”, a compliment to one of the least popular qualities of these times.
Born on April 1 in Brno, then Czechoslovakia (a country he would always call “Bohemia” in his work), the young Kundera maintained an ambivalent relationship with the communism that took over his homeland in 1948, a suspicion with which the authorities of the party were also watching him.
The end of relations occurred after the Prague Spring, in 1968, a movement to whose reforms he adhered fervently, and whose devastating end, the crash of Soviet tanks against the population, would become a primary scene in his work, repeated from different perspectives. optics and styles
It was a year after that event that his first novel appeared, “The Joke”, where he recounted (and already anticipated some of the reasons for “The Unbearable…”) the story of a student trapped by the love of two women and crushed by the weight of Stalinism. A year earlier he had published “The Book of Ridiculous Loves”, a compilation of stories written since 1958, where laughter is often mixed with chills. From 1972 dates what for many is his masterpiece, “Life is elsewhere”, a Kakfian parable about a young poet, influenced by Rimbaud, who tries the chimera of reconciling his existence with the guidelines of the communist government, until he he discovers that he no longer has land, nor identity, nor dreams.
jazz and literature
A lover of cinema and, above all, of music (Kundera, whose favorite composer was his compatriot Leos Janacek, was also a good jazz pianist, which came from his father’s influence), he modeled his literary forms with a freedom typical of jazz improvisations: this is how “Life is elsewhere” and some of his other books are written. His historical notes, his philosophical references (such as those he makes of Nietzsche and Parmenides in “The Unbearable…”) are not a mere exercise in scholarship but proof that the mixture of this knowledge, the quotes with irony, rhythmically, they can create novel literary horizons. And, as in jazz, which also admit (and demand) humor. Kunderian sarcasm is often, at times, more lacerating than Kafkaesque dark fabrications.
In 1979, four years after having broken with his country and already established in Paris (the city where he would settle forever), “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” appeared, a title in which two of the central topics are summarized. Of his work. Laughter, it has already been seen, and oblivion, that panacea that, according to the author, man had to endure the most painful of his existence, the ultimate question for being. And, of course, the references to his homeland are also present, in that dialectic of humor and gravity, of lightness and weight.
The beginning is worth reading: “In February 1948, the communist leader Klement Gottwald He stepped onto the balcony of a baroque palace in Prague to address the thousands of people who filled the Old Town Square. This was a turning point in Bohemian history. One of those defining moments that happens once or twice a millennium. Gottwald was surrounded by his comrades and right next to him was Clementis. The snow was fluttering, it was cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Clementis, ever so attentive, removed his fur cap and placed it on Gottwald’s head. The propaganda department released in hundreds of thousands of copies the photograph of the balcony from which Gottwald, with his cap on his head and his comrades next to him, speaks to the nation. On that balcony the history of communist Bohemia began. Every last child knew that photograph that appeared on advertising posters, in school manuals and in museums. Four years later, Clementis was accused of treason and hanged. The propaganda department immediately deleted it from the story and, of course, from all the photographs. Gottwald has been alone on the balcony ever since. In the place where Clementis was, only the empty wall of the palace appears. The only thing left of Clementis was the cap on Gottwald’s head.”
Kundera, who in the early 1990s abandoned Czech to write directly in French (the first two titles were “El arte de la novela” and “La lentitud”) has been compared to that of other bilingual writers, such as Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, although (it is honest to admit) the mastery that the latter came to acquire in their adopted language, English, was not the same as that of Kundera in French. In any case, although these last titles, such as “Identity” and “Ignorance”, in addition to those already mentioned, are inscribed with equal brilliance in the corpus of his work, his fatigue, morally rooted, frequently shines through. in your lines.
The fact that he has never won the Nobel Prize, in which he was mentioned so many times, is, as Borges would say, another Swedish superstition, which dignifies him even more.
2023-07-13 03:09:35
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