The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera died on Tuesday at his apartment in Paris, aged 94. A passionate advocate of the novel, which he saw as the essential European art form, Kundera came to prominence with two mid-career masterpieces, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). These formally inventive works bestrode a riven Europe, and with the fall of the Iron Curtain their seductive mix of philosophy, politics, and eros would launch a thousand backpacking trips to Prague.
The lure of a Kundera novel for American readers, I suspect, often had to do with a kind of political voyeurism. As a college student in the late 1990s, I didn’t just identify with the protagonist of The Unbearable Lightness, Tomas, a surgeon who critiques the ruling party, loses his job, and has to wash windows for a living—I wanted to be him. Contemplated from a safe remove, his status as a victim of totalitarian oppression was positively enviable—not to mention that the window-washer job brought the doctor into regular contact with lonely housewives.
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