Milan Kundera

Today is the 80th birthday of Milan Kundera. As Geordie Williamson observes in a thoughtful appreciation for The Australian, Kundera’s talent “has always been impressive in essence and deeply original. His method has been to graft abstract philosophical ideas with fictional invention to create narrative cyborgs: intellectually speculative, formally experimental, intermittently essayistic, yet warm-blooded, grounded in human experience. His characters are not mere automatons, programmed with pure theory and set to shuffling: they are sophisticated neural networks that grow through those dilemmas of love, history, nation and politics the author obliges them to confront.”

And so it seems appropriate that “An international conference will be held in his birthplace of Brno [Czechoslovakia]. In New York, a series of concerts of the music of Leos Janacek are being held in his honour,” and more.

However, Kundera will attend none of these events. Kundera has lived in France since leaving Czechoslovakia in 1975, and now his books feature French characters, are written in French, and lean towards philosphy more than politics. He’s been attacked by writers at home for not coming back after the fall of Communism, and been accused of having been a Communist informer during his youth.

Says Williamson: “What survives Kundera’s fall from fashion, his increasing quietude and the retrospective battering of his reputation is twofold: a profoundly moral refusal to moralise … and a determination to clearly articulate his own confusion: ‘We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.'”

Below, a 1968 interview with Kundera from French televison.