Books

Milan Kundera: ‘One of the true masters of the European novel has left us’

Rob Doyle salutes a gifted author, whose work married melancholy philosophising and bedroom slapstick

Milan Kundera in Paris in 1982. Photograph: Francois Lochon/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Rob Doyle
Thu Jul 13 2023 - 08:26

When a friend told me earlier today that the great Czech writer Milan Kundera has died aged 94 – what a hard harvest of male literary deaths it’s been this year – I quipped that Kundera’s importance was in having introduced an anglophone readership to the revolutionary idea that great novels don’t have to be deathly boring.

Reflecting further as the day unfolded, I realised that the supposed quip in fact encapsulated pretty much exactly what I think about Kundera’s work, which I caned in its entirety in my early twenties.

Here’s one possible definition of the novel (or “the European novel” as Kundera liked to specify, to him “an art born from the laughter of God”): that which is perpetually in danger of going stale. Each generation comes to the great works of the past with a certain boredom, issuing from a sense that the times no longer unfold to the rhythms of these grand works of yore, which we dutifully read nonetheless as part of our cultural formation.

And so it’s up to the writers of a given era to, as Ezra Pound exhorted his contemporaries, “make it new” – which, paradoxically enough, can only really be achieved through a sympathetic understanding of what has come before, and of the European novel as a form that renews itself across centuries, refusing to remain static or merely replicate the past.

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Milan Kundera preached and practised a radical renewal of the novel that favoured compression, speculative digression and an exquisite lightness of form that allowed him to tell politically, existentially and emotionally compelling stories without, as he put it in The Art of the Novel, having “to stray, even by a single line, from what he cares about, what fascinates him”.

A series of superb essay collections developed Kundera’s highly particular conception of the European novel, which he regarded as the ever-mutating crucible in which the modern self was formed

In an old Warren G song “the rhythm is the bass and the bass is the treble”, and in Kundera’s work philosophy is narrative and stories are philosophical. The idea of writers working a hybrid, genre-promiscuous style that can step lightly from narrative to essay and back again is old news, even something of a cliche – another threatened staleness – but Kundera did it early, and in so fresh and dexterous a way that, when I first came upon his novels decades after they were originally published, they hit me as a blast of fresh air that blew right open my sense of literary possibility.

The details of Kundera’s life are nothing if not novelistic, reflecting the Mitteleuropean glamour and heady political intrigue of his fiction. Born in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1929, his mischievous sense of humour and antiauthoritarian streak got him in early trouble with the Communist Party that came to power in 1945.

[ Milan Kundera obituary: Communist Party outcast whose sexually charged novels turned him into a literary star ]

By 1975, with several books to his name, all of them banned in his native country, Kundera relocated to Paris, where he would live as an exile – and write in French – for the rest of his life. It was there that he produced the novels that, by running rings around the Communist authorities back home and drawing worldwide attention to Central Europe’s struggle between memory and forgetting, won him major international fame and acclaim.

He leaves behind an extraordinary body of work: 10 novels, most of them worth reading (the later ones, from Slowness to The Festival of Insignificance, we’ll take or leave); a collection of short stories, Laughable Loves, that, like so much of his work, unfolds at the point where melancholy philosophising meets bedroom slapstick; and a series of superb essay collections that developed Kundera’s highly particular conception of the European novel, which he regarded as the ever-mutating crucible in which the modern self was formed.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being remains Kundera’s most widely read novel, and it’s a fine showcase for the unique charm, intellectual flair and metaphysical seductiveness that made his an unlikely household name. A haunting love story, set during the Prague Spring of 1968, that circles around a man named Tomáš and his young wife Teresa (the couple were played in the 1989 film adaptation by Daniel Day Lewis and Juliette Binoche), the novel’s animating element is Kundera’s singular narrative voice, at once playful, deep, erotic, funny, cynical, sad and human, all too human.

Sex and power, being and time, memory and forgetting – Kundera’s themes were big, broad and sweeping

Immortality and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting were no less great – dazzling canvases of writerly freedom on which Kundera could alternately tell salty jokes, meditate on Nietzsche, Stalin, Beethoven or Dvorak, tell powerful stories about men and women caught between the gears of history and the heat of lust, and basically do whatever the hell he wanted while somehow, and this was the magic of it, never losing the reader, never boring even for a paragraph.

Sex and power, being and time, memory and forgetting – Kundera’s themes were big, broad and sweeping. His books left a profound impression on me as they did on so many others, yet I find I’m reluctant to revisit his work, which may well contain flaws and blind spots I didn’t notice in my youthful exhilaration the first time round. When I did reread one of his books, The Art of the Novel, for a column I wrote for this newspaper a few years ago, I was indeed put off, in a way I hadn’t been as a younger reader, by Kundera’s massively self-assured, intensely certain tone. You wouldn’t get away with writing like that these days, and for good reasons. The aggressive denial of all doubt seems itself like a form of authoritarian control, perhaps a way of hiding something.

And yet the thrill of Kundera’s ideas – the alluring foreignness of his sensibility and his literary and artistic fixations (not just Cervantes and Kafka and Beethoven, but Hermann Broch and Robert Musil and Antonin Dvorák) – was very much still alive. I love Milan Kundera’s books, and I’m grateful for the world of ideas and art to which he was so elegant, so cultivated a guide. One of the true masters of the European novel has left us. Rest in Paris.

Rob Doyle’s books include Threshold and Autobibliography

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