The Unbearable Lightness of Being and 3 more must-read books by Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera in 1980. (Photo by Elisa Cabot via Wikimedia Commons)

One of the most prominent contenders for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Czech-born French writer Milan Kundera produced an enviable body of work in his lifetime. The author, who grew up in Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) during World War II, and moved to France in 1975, died after a prolonged fight with cancer. He was 94.

Known for his markedly different literary produce, Kundera created a unique place for himself in world literature. An incredibly gifted stylist, his fiction, which relied on the essential partnership between the reader and writer to render completeness to his work, was deeply influenced by German stalwarts like Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, and Robert Musil.

While the “polyhistoric” novelistic style of the latter two inspired him, he decided against mimicking them in his works, as he noted in an interview with The Paris Review. Perhaps their dense, digressive prose no longer appealed to the new, growing readership of the time, which fully embraced Kundera’s prose that intersected realism and philosophy.

His 1984 novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is arguably his most popular. Set in Prague in the 1960s and '70s, the book was a pioneering exploration of the material and intellectual strands of life. Juxtaposing real-life settings with a touch of philosophical underpinnings, it’s perhaps one of his most political of works. There are, however, other powerful and less-discussed novels where Kundera’s brilliance shines through.

The Joke (1967): Kundera’s first novel, The Joke was heavily influenced by Czech folklore. If his later works proved that he was more interested in exploring philosophical nuance through his characters and their motivations in his life, then its roots can be found in this seminal work. Good-to-have, peripheral details of the characters and settings are discounted in this work for the larger purpose of commenting and engaging with politics, authority, sex, and power.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979): The book is divided into seven parts. Here, Kundera presents himself as one of the most powerful chroniclers of the past, the politics of memory, forgetting, and how history is shaped in this book. An engaging, intricate, and deeply thoughtful literary fiction, this work focuses on what’s socialized about an idea and how it comes to dominate our consciousness and perception of the same. It can be as simple and complex as life or a joke, the relationship between two people, the physical nature of their sexual interaction, or largely what shapes the memory and politics of a piece of land.

Identity (1998): Through the two principal characters of this book, Kundera seems to be playing with the idea of the co-creation of identity between lovers. One of the defining qualities of Kundera’s prose, particularly in this book, is the focus on the interiority of the characters. Plagued by external validation – or perception management, the characters in the book dramatically influence their identity, which is the philosophical idea that Kundera wrestles with in this remarkable book.