Frank wrote on Aug 3
rd, 2023 at 3:59pm:
Milan Kundera: The Nobel Prize for Literature Winner We Never Had
Few writers in our time were more committed to the novel or had more idealism about the heights the form could scale.
How should one remember Kundera, now that his own end, after 90 years of history, has arrived? As a supreme anatomist of power? For his irony and playfulness, his cynical—though never unromantic—dissections of love? The strange sparse music of his books, his hatred of kitsch, his demonic delight in outraging our delusions? Will he be remembered at all, other than as a period piece? In a time of competing fundamentalisms—religious and political—it seems unlikely his posthumous reputation will have an easy ride, though as long as political or personal lies exist his work will have things to tell us. “The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” he famously wrote, and amnesia, it’s clear, is never out of fashion. The dream of communism—with its pat denial of human nature and its insistence that “real communism has never been tried”—refuses to disappear, whatever the car-crash with reality which invariably follows. In the world of Kundera’s books, there’s no divine justice and no crime’s ever properly redressed. Things merely fade over time, the world moves on, and people are never brutal enough with themselves to learn the lessons of experience. “History is as light as individual human life,” he wrote, “unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.” Should the same prove true of Kundera’s novels—more pertinent than ever as today’s clutch of dogmas press their shrill, mirthless suits for our surrender—then the joke, not a very funny one, will be on us.
https://quillette.com/2023/07/11/milan-kundera-the-nobel-prize-for-literature-wi...It is rare to see a book transition well to the screen but the movie Unbearable Lightness of Being, based on his book ( and foll oi wing it quite closely) was a triumph.
His other books are also very good, well worth reading and mulling over.
The late, lamented Milan
Kundera thought it was only a matter of time before the Western bourgeoisie, having shed the final vestiges of its cultural inheritance, would flock to exhibitions of garden gnomes, fluffy kittens and children in tears, while shunning those of Giotto, Titian, Monet and similar rubbish.
Had Kundera seen the ads being run by the Yes campaign, he would have known that in Australian politics, the triumph of
kitsch has come even sooner than he dared imagine.
It may be that barrages of kitsch-laden ads will convince voters to accept irreversible changes to our political institutions. But it is not irrational to place some confidence in the laconic common sense that was once regarded as the quintessence of our national character.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/common-sense-was-once-quintessential...
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Nobel Prize for Literature (Read 1758 times)
