'On April 1 (no joke), Milan Kundera turns 80'

From Eternal exile of Milan Kundera by Geordie Williamson :

For those of a certain generation, the sight of a Milan Kundera paperback can provoke a jolt of involuntary memory every bit as effective as Proust's madeleine.

[ image: Milan Kundera by Eric Lobbecke ]

Faber &Faber's black-and-white editions of his novels and stories were once the obligatory intellectual furniture of a thousand student bookshelves.

Titles such as Life is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being promised a kind of metaphysical bawdy, mixing high seriousness and low humour, and subverting traditional realism with elements of the surreal.

But these fictions were always more than Iron Curtain exotica. Kundera's talent, though unevenly applied throughout his career, 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.

Few, for example, have read and fewer understand German philosopher Martin Heidegger when he writes about truth and untruth, and their relation to human freedom (me included). But everyone can appreciate Sabina, the embodiment of his ideas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Sabina is one of the four central characters of Kundera's best-known and most successfully realised fiction. She escapes from communist Czechoslovakia to the West, only to be ground down by what Janet Malcolm, in her review of the novel, called a perpetual struggle against theunbearable banality of her situation as an emigre artist:

Sabina had once had an exhibit that was organised by a political organisation in Germany. When she picked up the catalogue, the first thing she saw was a picture of herself with a drawing of barbed wire superimposed on it. Inside she found a biography that read like the life of a saint or a martyr: she had suffered, struggled against injustice, been forced toabandon her bleeding homeland, yet was carrying on the struggle. "Her paintings are a struggle for happiness" was the final sentence.

Sabina's anger at this falsification leads her to make her own. Kundera regards this decision, to alter aspects of her background, then hide her nationality altogether after moving to the US, as an "attempt to escape the kitsch that people wanted to make of her life". Indeed, all of the freedoms that Sabina wins are won through untruth, concealment, betrayal. She is an emigre who achieves absolute freedom -- from country, parents, friends and lovers -- only at the cost of displacement, solitariness and growing dread at the thought of death:

they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

Of course, Sabina's response to the experience of exile shadows Kundera's own; she is his ideal and his cautionary tale. In the novel, Sabina flees to Geneva soon after the Russian invasion of 1968. Kundera was expelled from Czechoslovakia's Communist Party in 1970 for his involvement in the events of that same Prague Spring. He was made a non-person in his home country -- his poetry, essays, drama and fiction pulled from the shelves -- before deciding on French exile in 1975.

Kundera shares with Sabina the emigre's necessary betrayal and subsequent disappointment. He, too, escaped from totalitarian kitsch into a free world possessed of what John Updike calls our more subtle enslavements. It is the same world that inspired James Joyce to write the following:

No man can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself.

On April 1 (no joke), Milan Kundera turns 80. An international conference will be held in his birthplace of Brno. In New York, a series of concerts of the music of Leos Janacek are being held in his honour. Kundera will attend none of these events. And while newspapers, magazines and websites across the world weigh up the cost for the author of his adherence to Joyce's dictum, pondering how well has he balanced the demands of the crowd with his isolate stance, it's worth asking how much of Sabina's future has become Kundera's, too.

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