The long literary silence of Milan Kundera –beared with resignation by his acolytes and with stoicism by his editorial team, frequently consulted by the former about whether there was any news about the maestro– may have caused young people to be unfamiliar with his figure. That is why you would be surprised to learn that those who were young in the eighties and nineties, or rather, young readers with concerns, held his novels in high esteem, despite the fact that an undeniable conceptual density interrupted the narrative flow, and they probably did not reach each other. to decipher all the arguments and the details of the historical-political context. It did not matter.
Reading Kundera, who did not fully understand him, conferred status, drew dividing lines between the intellectually wounded letterheads and those given over to escapist hobbies. Crossing the corridors of any university with a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being under your arm meant sending a message from a brainy, cultured person with high vision. Twenty years earlier, the gesture would have operated as a flag of political commitment, let’s say a sign of rejection of censorship or support for those exiled for his ideas, but at that time it had, oh, something of a pose, of strutting. The irony of the matter is that the author himself, a lover and a scholar of a sense of humor, who since his debut in fiction, The joke, showed signs of interpreting it as the most effective shield against the absurdity of life and the abuses of power, he would surely have been amused to witness his work being channeled into self-promotion. Perhaps he would have seen in these airy students a reflection of Jaromil, the protagonist of Life is Elsewhere, who believes himself to be a poet when he has barely entered puberty.
The smallness of the individual, the ungovernability of our destiny, the endearing and ridiculous of our aspirations, in short, the tragicomic nature of everyone’s life marked his first novels, where the wound of communist repression pushed him to turn literature into a field of creative experimentation, mixing genres and voices, reflection and narration. All the freedom absent in the physical world was made up for by the limitless possibilities of the world of the imagination. “Whoever seeks infinity should close their eyes”, he famously declared, but he might as well have said: “let him start writing fiction”. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, published in 1984, marked a turning point in his career for various reasons, it was an international best seller – perhaps its success lay in the fact that the exploration of love was moving and its philosophical thread stimulated more than the political vicissitudes of its protagonists–, had its cinematographic adaptation, its title penetrated the (semi) popular language, serving to give them a deep impression without many times neither the sender nor the receiver fully understanding what was really being expressed (Kundera must be one of the few writers with two titles that have served the masses as a polysemic wild card, the other would be La vida está en otro parte), and it is the last of his novels with true narrative weight.
Between 1988 and throughout the 1990s, the French nationalized Czech genius took a more metaphysical, philosophical, nostalgic and contemplative turn to his novels, betting on one-word titles that encompass major concepts and that, with the exception of the first , Immortality, are brief treatises rather than pure narratives. In Identity, Slowness and Ignorance Kundera returns to some of his great themes –memory, love, oblivion, the passage of time…–, but already with the gaze of a settled sage who reveals himself capable of polishing the idea until leaving it in its essence. Some phrases are worth entire books of others. And this reminds us that, of course, we must not forget his brilliant essay contribution –more anecdotal was his passage through poetry, theater or storytelling–, where he shared his knowledge of music, novels, art or translation . If we are to believe in the theory of Nietzsche’s eternal return that opens the pages of The Unbearable…, his books will once again hang from the arms of young people.
