Review | Milan Kundera's first novel in 14 years a witty play on insignificance
Czech author engages in some navel-gazing in his 10th novel, whose middle-aged Parisian characters are preoccupied with sex, art, fiction, death and politics
Milan Kundera is surely a contender for the title, both unwanted and wanted, of the greatest living writer yet to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. That Kundera is one of the world's leading authors can be gauged by reading the admiring comments of peers such as Philip Roth and those he influenced, including Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Carlos Fuentes and John Updike.
Born in the former Czechoslovakia in 1929, Kundera's career spans half a century. It began with a masterpiece, The Joke (1967), in which a sexed-up young communist named Ludvik Jahn falls foul of the authorities courtesy of an off-hand joke scrawled carelessly on a postcard to a girl he fancies: "Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!"
These themes - politics, comedy, defiance, sex - define the great works of Kundera's middle period, most famously in 1984's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Set between the Prague Spring and Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Kundera turns the erotic and political lives of Tomas, a surgeon, his long-suffering wife, Tereza, and his hat-wearing lover, Sabina, into a meditation on importance and lightness - the fleeting speed of existence at once weighty and light as air.
The other fine books of this period, Life is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Laughable Loves, follow similar trajectories, exploring surrealism, humour and revolution rebellion all with heavy doses of the erotic. What marked Kundera out was the idiosyncrasy of his form which combined linear narrative, the essay, the comic philosophising of Laurence Sterne, Miguel Cervantes and Denis Diderot.