Milan Kundera: Brief return to the work of a very great writer who has just left us – Le Journal de Montréal

Milan Kundera, the great writer, I just passed away at the age of 94.

I remember discovering his work. I am 18 years old. I was offered the unbearable lightness of being. I jumped in right away and was hooked. It was a philosophical novel in the form of an inquiry into existence, and modern existence in particular.

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For Kundera, literature not only served to tell stories, but also made it possible to explore the contradictions of the world, its facticity. Mainly because his characters were always, or almost always, at a distance from themselves, aware of evolving in a comedy called society, attached to their role but still felt trapped in it. Whoever dives into this great collection of short stories, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, will see.

Kundera was a master of irony who knew the tragedy of humanity but never managed to take it absolutely seriously, despite experiencing communism in his native Czechoslovakia. This, however, will not stop him from reflecting on the disruptive function of humor in totalitarian regimes, as we shall rediscover when re-reading The Joke.

Kundera also knew how to integrate real essays into the core of his books, presented as a meditative continuation of the story, as we see in Immortality, perhaps his most beautiful book.

Kundera, the novelist, was also a political thinker in his own way, placing the situation of what he called “small nations” at the center of his thinking. In his opinion, the latter were distinguished not by their size but by their existential situation. A small nation aware of its possible disappearance and precarious identity. One immediately thinks of the Baltic countries and other peoples bordering on Russia. One also thinks of Quebec, of course, where Kundera was widely read.

The lesser-known Kundera was also undeterred by the right-wing ideology that has ravaged the West for the past 30 years.

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It is worth quoting him as early as 1993: “Since we no longer live under the threat of concentration camps in the West, we can say or write nothing, as the struggle for human rights gained popularity it lost all concrete content.” becoming a common attitude towards everything, a kind of energy that transforms desires into rights. The world has become a human right and everything has turned into rights: the desire for love to the right to love, the desire for rest to the right to rest, the desire for friendship to the right to friendship, the desire to speed in the right , to drive too fast, the desire for happiness in the right to happiness, the desire to publish a book, right to publish a book, desire to scream in the streets at night, right to scream in the streets at night .

Kundera understood the madness of our time.

Les eaux seront plus agitees pour le Canadien lan prochain