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Immortality
The New York Times bestseller by the author of legendary cult classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'Like all great writers, Kundera leaves indelible marks on his readers' imaginations.' Salman Rushdie From a playful gesture between an old woman in a swimming pool and a youthful lifeguard springs the heroine of a novel: Agnès. In the course of her daily life - Saturday chores, saunas, lunch in the hectic Paris streets - memories arise of her dead father, an unexpected widower. Their conversations flood back, and Agnès realises that her secret inheritance was his way of granting her freedom. As s he mentally revisits her childhood, from formative loves to her intense relationship with her sister, her past casts light on her present: her marriage, daughter, and eventual death. Exploring identity and existence, eroticism and modernity - with cameos from Goethe, Dali, Hemingway, and beyond - Immortality illuminates the nature of selfhood with inimitable wit, grace and intellectual nimbleness. 'A serial feast, a banquet for the brain.' Observer 'A joy to read. Wise, rueful, whimsically philosophical, Kundera teases the reader with provocations and paradoxes.' Evening Standard
The Art of the Novel
The classic of literary criticism from one of the world's greatest novelists. In seven independent, but closely related chapters, Milan Kundera presents his personal conception of the European novel, which he describes as 'an art born of the laughter of God'. 'Invigoratingly suggestive . . . Kundera's map of the development of the European novel is outlined with the reckless brevity of the man who knows exactly what and where the salient points are.' London Review of Books 'Kundera is the saddest, funniest and most loveable of authors.' The Times
Encounter
Milan Kundera’s new collection of essays is a passionate defence of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his novels he illuminates the art and artists who remain important to him and whose work helps us better understand the world. An astute and brilliant reader of fiction, Kundera applies these same gifts to the reading of Francis Bacon’s paintings, Leos Janfcek’s music, the films of Federico Fellini, as well as to the novels of Philip Roth, Dostoyevsky and García Mfrquez, among others. He also takes up the challenge of restoring to their rightful place the works of major writers such as Anatole France and Curzio Malaparte who have fallen into obscurity.Milan Kundera’s signature themes of memory and forgetting, the experience of exile, and his spirited championing of modernist art mark these essays. Art, he argues, is what we have to cleave to in the face of evil, against the expression of the darker side of human nature. Elegant, startlingly original and provocative, Encounter follows Kundera’s essay collections, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed and The Curtain.
Life is Elsewhere
Befriend a budding poet and his adoring mother in this seductive early novel - winner of the Prix Médicis - by the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'An artist, clearly one of the greatest to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie 'Kundera's achievement has been to bring both private life and political life into one comic framework.' Ian McEwan Young Jaromil knows he is special; in fact, he is a poet bestowed with literary genius, heir to Rimbaud. He knows this because his adoring mother told him so. Adult Jaromil, still revelling in these truths, draws on his talents to find romance whilst making his mark on the world through both his poetry and advancing the Communist revolution. Son, Poet, Lover. In which of these roles does Jaromil's true existence lie? A blazingly satirical reflection on the 'lyrical age' of youthful innocence, this ironic epic of adolescence showcases Kundera's savage yet tender wit at its finest.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
'A cult figure.' Guardian 'A dark and brilliant achievement.' Ian McEwan 'Shamelessly clever ... Exhilaratingly subversive and funny.' Independent 'A modern classic ... As relevant now as when it was first published. ' John Banville A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon; a man torn between his love for her and his womanising. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals; while her other lover stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by choices and events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance and weight - and we feel 'the unbearable lightness of being'. The Unbeara...
Farewell Waltz
A dazzling tragicomic tale from the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'Anyone reading Kundera's books is unlikely to forget them. They have an essential energy, a difference.' New Statesman 'Kundera is a self-confessed hedonist in a world beset by politics . . . Marvellous.' Salman Rushdie Klima, a celebrated jazz trumpeter, learns that a young nurse with whom he spent one brief night at a fertility spa is pregnant - and she has decided he is the father. Thus begins a whirlwind farce as he returns to the spa: an accelerating dance which unfolds over five madcap days, encompassing Klima's jealous wife, the nurse's equally jealous boyfriend, a fanatical gynaecologist, a rich American (at once Don Juan and saint) and an elderly political prisoner who is holding a farewell party before emigration. Posing serious philosophical questions with his inimitable blasphemous lightness, Farewell Waltz is perhaps the most purely entertaining of Kundera's novels, rich in black humour and profound human insights.
Identity
A philosophical masterpiece by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie 'Kundera designs fictions of the highest order.' Ian McEwan Chantal awaits her partner in a hotel on the Normandy coast, struggling to find him on a crowded beach. After mistaking him for a stranger, they reunite, and she reveals her fears of men no longer turning to look at her. Soon, she begins to receive mysterious love letters, which she hides in her underwear drawer - but as the border between fantasy and reality blurs, perhaps the secret correspondent is someone closer to her than she realises? In this disquieting love story, Kundera reveals our shifting perceptions of selfhood over time, especially within the intimacy of a relationship - and makes us question our own existence.
The Festival of Insignificance
The last novel by the international superstar and author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'Kundera is the saddest, funniest, and most lovable of authors.' Times An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie 'Kundera designs fictions of the highest order.' Ian McEwan Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time avoiding realism - that's The Festival of Insignificance. In Kundera's earlier novel, Slowness, Vera, the author's wife, says to her husband: 'you've often told me you meant to write a book one day that would have not a single serious word in it . . . I warn you: watch out. Your enemies are lying in wait.' Far from watching out, Kundera finally and fully realises his old aesthetic dream in a novel that we could view as a summation of his whole work. A strange sort of summation. Strange sort of epilogue. Strange sort of laughter, inspired by our era, which is comical because it has lost all sense of humor. What more can we say of Kundera's last novel? Nothing. Just read.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
'A masterpiece' (Salman Rushdie) by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'It took the temperature of the age as no other book did. It was the great novel of the end of European Communism: a novel of ideas and eroticism, the surreal and the naturalistic.' Howard Jacobson 'One is torn between profound pleasure in the novel's execution and wonder at the pain that inspired it.' Ian McEwan One freezing day in 1948, Klement Gottwald addresses Prague, wearing his comrade Clementis' fur cap - and Communist Czechoslovakia is born. But after being hanged for treason, Clementis is airbrushed out of propaganda photographs. All that remains is a bare wall, and his cap. So begin...
