Milan Kundera RIP

[Antepli Ejderha]

He's died aged 94.

About 25 years ago I had a phase of reading him, really loved some of his work apart from The Unbearable Lightness of Being

[Discordant Resonance]

Interesting to see his contemporary, Ivan Klima, is still with us - immediately after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Harvill Secker published a number of his works in translation, including Judge on Trial, which I enjoyed, but he appears to have fallen out of fashion in recent years.

[Incandenza]

Haven't read him since college, but I found an old copy of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting while I was going through some things, and held on to that. Maybe it's time to give that another read.

[matt j]

It's been quite a while since I've read his works, and to be honest, long enough that I mixed up some of his works with Klima's.

Still, though, RIP quite a life and body of work.

[slackster]

I’m another who read a few of his earlier, more political novels in the 80s, and I recall enjoying them enough to read more than one. But if I’m honest don’t remember much about them apart from feeling there were vaguely Kafka-esque plot points, and never sought out later work.

[Janik]

Oh.

Still, 94 is a good long life.

His later output was OK, but I wouldn’t put it beyond that. He wanted to be regarded as a French writer, but his novels written in French (the ones from Slowness on) wouldn’t put him high in the pantheon of that Countries literature. Whereas the Czech ones would do so for Czech lit.