Prague is in mourning, and so am I. My heart dresses in black on this July morning, because Milan Kundera is no more. The candle goes out after having embalmed the world of literature and enlightening thousands of victims of their unbearable lightness. But life is elsewhere, and Milan Kundera is no more.
The Czech author said that ” [l]man can end his life. But he cannot put an end to his immortality. And what a great way to ensure his own through art, since Tereza and Tomas, between a few romantic setbacks, infidelities and protests, will carry forever, in the pages of The Unbearable Lightness of Beingthe imprint of the activist and poet that he was.
When I read Milan Kundera, I always imagine him with a smirk, as if satisfied to have succeeded in putting my thoughts into words, even before I identified him myself. I also imagine myself in a city of waters, the perfect setting for dancing the waltz, then I let myself be transported by his incomparable pen, mixing so well the finitude of Nietzsche with the tragedy and symbolism of Kafka, without forgetting the realism of Tolstoy. .
It has often happened to me to think that the uniqueness of the stories of the deceased lies in the duality of the feelings they provoke. His works are predictable, yet disconcerting, so logical and yet so casual. Above all, they draw attention to banal facts of everyday life and paint a portrait of the mental pattern that led to them: life is never the same after reading Kundera. We acquire the ability to define vertigo, we accept that love and deception coexist, we pay particular attention to the navels and we suddenly understand that litost is in us.
The Prague Spring would have existed with or without the author ofA west kidnapped, but we know it better thanks to the latter. Finally, we know it differently, in its lyrical form, the one that knows how to speak to the heart, the one that invites the most skeptical to flee ignorance. Infallible vectors of Soviet history and that of the communist era, the works of the Czech dissident take on the forms of stolen dreams, of laughable loves, of revolutionary ideas that have yet been silenced.
Like Camus, who embraced the absurd, Kundera made irony his armour. He also equipped himself with sarcasm in his arsenal to return triumphant from his quest to paint the human condition, even to grasp its identity, defined even by eroticism at times.
France welcomed Milan Kundera, and the latter returned his welcome by marrying his language to his. As for me, it opened my mind and consolidated my love for reading. While the previous lines can be considered as a tribute or an invitation to discover this lucid writer, they represent above all thanks, from me, from other readers and from Central Europe. To this, I am amused to imagine that, quite humbly, Kundera would have replied that ” [l]he great novels are always a little smarter than their authors”.
Prague is in mourning, and so am I, but you have to laugh and forget.