Milan Kundera
“A novel shouldn’t be like a bike race but a feast of many courses,” wrote Milan Kundera in Immortality. “What is essential in a novel,” he also wrote, “is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the nonessential.” Milan Kundera is, as I believe, the contemporary genius. First, it was what he wrote that enchanted me and slowly it was the form, how it unveiled, that held me the most captive.
The Joke
The first book Kundera wrote, and slightly unlike the others. It put Kundera on the map and got him kicked out of his own country.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality
I believe Immortality to take the top. As many times as I’ve read it, each time I find the hidden jewel, each time another jewel. I relish the story’s unfolding and how the main story is at times not even what is important. I have made reference to Immortality here.
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