2023-07-12 09:13:41
The Franco-Czech writer Milan Kunderaone of the greatest voices in world literature, died on Tuesday July 11 at the age of 94 in Paris, his publisher Gallimard announced to AFP on Wednesday July 12.
The author of “The Joke” (1965) and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1984) “died in the followingnoon of Tuesday July 11, 2023”, said Gallimard in a press release.
“Unfortunately, I can confirm that Mr. Milan Kundera has died (…) following a long illness,” Anna Mrazova, spokeswoman for the Milan Kundera Library, told AFP in her statement. hometown of Brno.
One of the most influential French-language novelists
A sarcastic painter of the human condition, Kundera was one of the rare authors to have entered the prestigious editions of La Pléiade (in 2011) during his lifetime.
Born Czech, stripped of this nationality before regaining it later, but French since 1981, he was one of the most influential French-language novelists in the world.
When he was still Czech, Milan Kundera published two novels, “La Joking” (1965, praised in particular by the French poet Aragon) and “Risibles amours” (1968), texts drawing up a bitter assessment of the political illusions of the generation of the Prague coup which, in 1948, enabled the Communists to come to power.
Blacklisted in his country following the Prague Spring, Kundera went into exile in France in 1975 with his wife Vera, a star presenter on Czech television.
exile in France
Naturalized French by François Mitterrand in 1981, he will therefore choose French as the language of writing, to mark his break with a native country which stripped him of his nationality in 1979, then returned it to him in 2019.
In France, he published “The Farewell Waltz”, “The Book of Laughter and Oblivion”… In 1984, what some consider to be his masterpiece, “The Unbearable Lightness of being”, a wonderful love novel and ode to freedom, both serious and casual, whose subject is nothing less than the human condition.
Abstaining from expressing himself in the media, wishing that people talk regarding his work and nothing else, Kundera lived discreetly in the center of Paris, with his wife Vera.
He had been the victim of macabre hoaxes several times on social networks where his death was announced before the hour.
With AFP
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