Milan Kundera

Passados mais de dez anos da publicação de seu último romance, Milan Kundera — um dos maiores escritores vivos — volta à ficção com uma trama breve e espirituosa ambientada em Paris nos dias de hoje. Autor de romances, volumes de contos, ensaios, uma peça de teatro e alguns livros de poemas, Milan Kundera, nascido na República Tcheca e naturalizado francês, é um dos maiores intelectuais vivos. Ficou especialmente conhecido por aquela que é considerada sua obra-prima, A Insustentável leveza do ser, adaptada ao cinema por Philip Kaufman em 1988. Vencedor de inúmeros prêmios, como o Grand Prix de Littérature da Academia Francesa pelo conjunto da obra e o Prêmio da Biblioteca Nacional da França, Kundera costuma figurar entre os favoritos ao Nobel de Literatura. Seus livros já foram traduzidos para mais de trinta línguas, e há mais de quinze anos o autor tem sua obra publicada no Brasil pela Companhia das Letras. Em 2013, o mundo editorial se surpreendeu com um novo romance de Kundera, que já não publicava obras de ficção desde o lançamento de A ignorância, há mais de dez anos. A festa da insignificância foi aclamado pela crítica e despertou enorme interesse dos leitores na França e na Itália, onde logo figurava em todas as listas de best-sellers. Lembrando A grande beleza, filme de Paolo Sorrentino acolhido com entusiasmo pelo público brasileiro no mesmo ano, o novo romance de Milan Kundera coloca em cena quatro amigos parisienses que vivem numa deriva inócua, característica de uma existência contemporânea esvaziada de sentido. Eles passeiam pelos jardins de Luxemburgo, se encontram numa festa sinistra, constatam que as novas gerações já se esqueceram de quem era Stálin, perguntam-se o que está por trás de uma sociedade que, ao invés dos seios ou das pernas, coloca o umbigo no centro do erotismo. Na forma de uma fuga com variações sobre um mesmo tema, Kundera transita com naturalidade entre a Paris de hoje em dia e a União Soviética de ontem, propondo um paralelo entre essas duas épocas. Assim o romance tematiza o pior da civilização e lança luz sobre os problemas mais sérios com muito bom humor e ironia, abraçando a insignificância da existência humana. Mas será insignificante, a insignificância? Assim Kundera responde a essa questão: “A insignificância, meu amigo, é a essência da existência. Ela está conosco em toda parte e sempre. Ela está presente mesmo ali onde ninguém quer vê-la: nos horrores, nas lutas sangrentas, nas piores desgraças. Isso exige muitas vezes coragem para reconhecê-la em condições tão dramáticas e para chamá-la pelo nome. Mas não se trata apenas de reconhecê-la, é preciso amar a insignificância, é preciso aprender a amá-la”.

Nos anos 60 em Praga, Tchecoslováquia, Tomas é um médico totalmente apolítico, que tem como hobby ter diversas parceiras sexuais, mas evitando sempre um maior envolvimento. Mas duas mulheres: Sabina, uma artista plástica, e Tereza, uma empregada de mesa, que sonha em ser fotógrafa, vão estar muito presentes na sua vida. Mas ao serem atingidos pelos acontecimentos de 1968, conhecido como "A Primavera de Praga", quando tanques soviéticos invadiram a capital tcheca para pôr fim a uma série de protestos, a vida deste triângulo amoroso é afectada, pois os seus sonhos são destruídos e as suas vidas mudam para sempre.

Sie kam ihm vor wie ein Kind, das jemand in ein pechbestrichenes Körbchen gelegt und auf dem Fluß ausgesetzt hatte, damit er es am Ufer seines Bettes barg. Der Prager Chirurg Tomas, der die Frauen begehrt und zugleich fürchtet, ein Erotomane, der seine Scheidung wie eine Hochzeit feierte und fortan der Liebe aus dem Weg ging, bricht für die Kellnerin Teresa mit einigen seiner Grundsätze. Seine erotischen Freundschaften, wie jene mit der Malerin Sabina, führt er aber weiter. Teresa verläßt ihn in Zürich, wo sich die beiden, inzwischen verheiratet, nach dem russischen Einmarsch in Prag, niedergelassen haben. Sie kehrt in ihr Heimatland zurück...

Tal vez por haber sido escritas en el perodo (entre 1959, y 1968) ms feliz de la vida de Milan Kundera, segn sus propias palabras, estas narraciones son las ms alegres, las ms seriamente desvergonzadas y las ms reflexivamente divertidas de su obra. La farndula de personajes hedonistas que desfila aqu ante nosotros en busca de los juegos mltiples y contradictorios de la amistad, el amor y el sexo no puede sino incitar a la risa, atrapados como estn en el mundo loco de severidad, hermetismo e inquisicin que les rodea. Una risa autntica, traviesa; un humor sabio, sagaz y gozador, al que ya nos tiene acostumbrados el autor de La insoportable levedad del ser.

Klima, a celebrated jazz trumpeter, receives a phone call announcing that a young nurse with whom he spent a brief night at a fertility spa is pregnant. She has decided he is the father. And so begins a comedy in which, during five madcap days, events unfold with ever-increasing speed. Klima's beautiful, jealous wife; the nurse's equally jealous boyfriend; a fanatical gynecologist; a rich American, at once Don Juan and saint; and an elderly political prisoner who, just before his emigration, is holding a farewell party at the spa, are all drawn into this black comedy, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream. As usual, Milan Kundera poses serious questions with a blasphemous lightness which makes us understand that the modern world has taken away our right to tragedy.

There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognize the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is erased while we simultaneously doubt our own. This also happens with couples--indeed, above all with couples, because lovers fear more than anything else "losing sight" of that loved one. With stunning artfulness in expanding and playing variations on the meaningful moment, Milan Kundera has made this situation--and the vague sense of panic it inspires--the very fabric of his novel. Here brevity goes hand in hand with intensity, and a moment of bewilderment marks the start of a labyrinthine journey during which the reader repeatedly crosses the border between the real and the unreal, between what occurs in the world outside, and what the mind creates in its solitude. Of all contemporary writers, only Kundera can transform such a hidden and disconcerting perception into the material for a novel, one of his finest, most painful, and most enlightening. Which, surprisingly, turns out to be a love story.

A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they had chosen to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence "their memories no longer match." We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion. Then again, what can we expect of our weak memory? It records only "an insignificant, minuscule particle" of the past, "and no one knows why it's this bit and not any other bit." We live our lives sunk in a vast forgetting, a fact we refuse to recognize. Only those who return after twenty years, like Odysseus returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance firsthand.Milan Kundera is the only author today who can take such dizzying concepts as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.Author Biography: The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, for more than twenty years. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, The Farewell Party, The Books of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves, all originally written in Czech. Like Slowness, his two earlier nonfiction works, The Art ofthe Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.

This breathtaking, reverberating survey of human nature finds Kundera still attempting to work out the meaning of life, without losing his acute sense of humour. It is one of those great unclassifiable masterpieces that appear once every twenty years or so. 'It will make you cleverer, maybe even a better lover. Not many novels can do that.' Nicholas Lezard, GQ

Chantal y Jean-Marc viven juntos en París y se quieren, se quieren tanto que incluso parecen confundirse. Y es que, a veces, se dan situaciones en las que, por un instante, ninguno de los dos parece reconocerse, en el que la identidad del otro se disuelve y, de rechazo, duda de la suya propia. Todo el que ama, todo el que convive en pareja, lo ha vivido alguna vez, porque lo que más teme en el mundo quien ama es «perder de vista» al ser amado. Pues eso es lo que, poco a poco, va a empezar a ocurrirles a Chantal y a Jean-Marc. Pero ¿en qué instante, ante qué gesto y en qué circunstancia precisa comienza ese aterrador proceso? Kundera atrapa al lector en el pánico que acompaña ese instante de extravío y éste ya no tendrá más remedio que adentrarse en el laberinto que recorren Chantal y Jean-Marc y en el que más de una vez deberá cruzar la frontera de lo real y lo irreal —o entre lo que ocurre en el mundo exterior y lo que elabora una mente en solitario.

La insoportable levedad del ser narra una extraordinaria historia de amor, es decir, de celos, sexo, traiciones, muerte y, también, de las debilidades y paradojas de Teresa, Tomás, Franz y Sabina, cuyos destinos se entrelazan irremediablemente. Los celos de Teresa hacia Tomás, el terco amor de éste por ella -junto con su irrefenable deseo de otras mujeres-, el idealismo de Franz, amante de Sabina, y la necesidad de Sabina de perseguir una libertad que sólo conduce a una insoportable levedad, se convierten en una reflexión sobre los problemas filosóficos que afectan a nuestra existencia.

"Le monde des théories n'est pas le mien. Ces réflexions sont celles d'un praticien. L'oeuvre de chaque romancier contient une vision implicite de l'histoire du roman, une idée de ce qu'est le roman. C'est cette idée du roman, inhérente à mes romans, que j'ai fait parler." Milan Kundera.

Laughable Loves is a collection of stories that first appeared in print in Prague before 1968, but was then was subsequently banned. The seven stories are all concerned with love, or rather with the complex erotic games and stratagems employed by women and especially men as they try to come to terms with needs and impulses that can start a terrifying train of events. Sexual attraction is shown as a game that often turns sour, an experience that brings with it painful insights and releases uncertainty, panic, vanity and a constant need for reassurance. Thus a young couple on holiday start a game of pretence that threatens to destroy their relationship, two middle-aged men go in search of girls they don't really want, a young man renews contact with an older woman who feels humiliated by her ageing body, an elderly doctor uses his beautiful wife to increase his attraction and minister to his sexual vanity. In Laughable Loves, Milan Kundera shows himself, once again, as a master of fiction's most graceful illusions and surprises.

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. A chance encounter leads a man to spend the afternoon with an older woman, now a widow, who escaped him fifteen years earlier. Neither of them doubts that the day will end in disgust, but for one intimate moment each finds a way to overcome mortality. Written in 1969, before Milan Kundera was known to English-speaking readers, this story renders male and female characters painful equals, and prompted Philip Roth to admire its 'detached Chekhovian tenderness'. Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work.

Et je me demande : qui a rêvé ? Qui a rêvé cette histoire ? Qui l'a imaginée ? Elle ? Lui ? Tous les deux ? Chacun pour l'autre ? Et à partir de quel moment leur vie réelle s'est-elle transformée en cette fantaisie perfide ?

Kundera initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed, and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent ("innocence with its bloody smile"!), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He's no creep, he's Rimbaud. Rimbaud entrapped by the communist revolution, entrapped in a sombre farce.

"Il suo romanzo ci dimostra come nella vita tutto quello che scegliamo e apprezziamo come leggero non tarda a rivelare il proprio peso insostenibile. Forse solo la vivacità e la mobilità dell'intelligenza sfuggono a questa condanna: le qualità con cui è scritto il romanzo, che appartengono a un altro universo da quello del vivere." (Italo Calvino) "Chi è pesante non può fare a meno di innamorarsi perdutamente di chi vola lievemente nell'aria, tra il fantastico e il possibile: mentre i leggeri sono respinti dai loro simili e trascinati dalla 'com-passione' verso i corpi e le anime possedute dalla pesantezza. Così accade nel romanzo: Tomáš ama Tereza, Tereza ama Tomáš: Franz ama Sabina, Sabina (almeno per qualche mese) ama Franz; quasi come nelle «Affinità elettive» si forma il perfetto quadrato delle affinità amorose." (Pietro Citati)

Tomas et Teresa sont les deux pôles du roman. Faut-il choisir de porter le poids du passé sur ses épaules, comme Teresa qui ne peut se passer de la Tchécoslovaquie, qu'elle a pourtant fuie après le Printemps de Prague, de même qu'elle ne peut vivre sans Tomas, ce mari qu'elle chérit d'un amour jaloux et, par là, à jamais insatisfait ? Ou bien faut-il préférer à cette pesanteur la légèreté de l'être qui caractérise Tomas et Sabina, la maîtresse amie qui seule peut comprendre le médecin séducteur explorant les femmes comme s'il disséquait des objets d'étude au scalpel ? Ne sachant quelle orientation est la plus supportable, le roman offre tour à tour le regard des différents personnages. Même le chien Karénine a droit au chapitre. Mais ce ballet incertain teinté d'irréalité apparaît vite comme une interrogation dialectique qui oscille entre réflexion et délire poétique pour aboutir à la conclusion que la pesanteur et la légèreté, pareillement insoutenables, ne procèdent jamais d'une décision véritable. --Sana Tang-Léopold Wauters

Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is just merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy.

Sedm povídek, jejichž námětem je láska zasazená do komických souvislostí, anebo spíš to, co lidé v komických souvislostech pokládají za pokus o milostný vztah. Svazek obsahuje povídky Nikdo se nebude smát, Zlaté jablko věčné touhy, Falešný autostop

"A defense of fiction and a lesson in the art of reading." — New York Times Book Review " Testaments Betrayed  is to be savored paragraph by paragraph. . . . It must be purchased, read, pondered, and argued within the margins. And frequently reread." —  Washington Post A brilliant and thought-provoking essay from one of the twentieth century’s masters of fiction, Testaments Betrayed is written like a the same characters appear and reappear throughout the nine parts of the book, as do the principal themes that preoccupy the author. Kundera is a passionate defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due a work of art and its creator’s wishes. The betrayal of both—often by their most passionate proponents—is one of the key ideas that informs this strikingly original and elegant book.

Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the post-psychological novel.

Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970's. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than just its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed and experienced.

"Un rideau magique, tissé de légendes, était suspendu devant le monde. Cervantes envoya don Quichotte en voyage et déchira le rideau. Le monde s'ouvrit devant le chevalier errant dans toute la nudité comique de sa prose...... c'est en déchirant le rideau de la préinterprétation que Cervantes a mis en route cet art nouveau ; son geste destructeur se reflète et se prolonge dans chaque roman digne de ce nom ; c'est le signe d'identité de l'art du roman."

From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an unexpected and enchanting novel—the culmination of his life's work. Casting light on the most serious of problems, and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world, and at the same time completely avoiding realism—that’s The Festival of Insignificance. Readers who know Milan Kundera’s earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the “unserious” in a novel is not at all unexpected of him. In Immortality, Goethe and Hemingway stroll through several chapters together talking and laughing. And in Slowness, Vera, the author’s wife, says to her husband: “you’ve often told me you meant to write a book one day that would have not a single serious word in it…I warn you: watch out. Your enemies are lying in wait.” Now, far from watching out, Kundera is finally and fully realizing his old aesthetic dream in this novel that we could easily view as a summation of his whole work. A strange sort of summation. Strange sort of epilogue. Strange sort of laughter, inspired by our time, which is comical because it has lost all sense of humor. What more can we say? Nothing. Just read.

All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now though, a quarter century after The Joke was first published, and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature, that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence. The present edition provides English-language readers an important further means toward revaluation of The Joke. For reasons he describes in his Author's Note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating (with the assistance of his American publisher-editor) a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also to the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel's narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. This magnificent novel juxtaposes geographically distant places, brilliant and playful reflections, and a variety of styles, to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world’s truly great writers.

"Ne yapacağını bilemeden bir avlunun karşı tarafındaki duvara dalıp gitmek; bir aşk anında karnındaki inatçı gurultuya kulak vermek; ihanet etmek; ihanetin göz kamaştırıcı yolunu terk ederek gücü kendinde bulamamak; Büyük Yürüyüş'te kalabalıklarla birlikte yumruğunu havaya kaldırmak; gizlenmiş mikrofonlar önünde espri gösterisi yapmak - bu durumların hepsini tanıdım, hepsini yaşadım... Romanlarımdaki kişiler kendime ilişkin gerçekleşmemiş olabilirliklerdir... Her biri benim ancak kenarında dolaştığım bir sınırı aşmıştır... Çünkü romanın sorguladığı sır o sınırın ötesinde başlar. Roman yazarın itirafları değildir; bir tuzak haline gelmiş dünyamızda yaşanan insan hayatının araştırılmasıdır." - Milan Kundera

Δύο πρόσωπα που αναζητούν το ένα την ταυτότητα του άλλου, έπειτα απο πολύχρονη ωστόσο συμβίωση. Που αναζητούν όμως και το καθένα τη δική του ταυτότητα, μέσα απο τη σχέση με τον άλλο, και μέσα απο ένα στρατήγημα που δοκιμάζει την αγάπη τους, για να την αποκαταστήσει στο τέλος. Μιά διαδρομή απο την πραγματικότητα στην επικράτεια του ονείρου: οι ήρωες και μαζί τους ο αναγνώστης περνούν τα αόρατα σύνορα απο την πραγματική ζωή στη φανταστική, παρασυρμένοι απο πρόσωπα, μοτίβα, χρώματα, τα οποία επανέρχονται απο τον ένα κόσμο στον άλλο, υπονομεύοντας την πραγματικότητα και οδηγώντας ανεπαίσθητα σ έναν εφιάλτη που θα τον καταλύσει ο έρωτας.