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Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera


Born
in Brno, Czechia, Czech Republic
April 01, 1929

Died
July 11, 2023

Genre
Literature & Fiction

Influences
Robert Musil, Witold Gombrowicz, Sterne, Diderot, François Rabelais, H ...more


Milan Kundera (1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Czech and French novelist. He went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.

Kundera wrote in Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; people therefore consider these original works as not translations. He is best known for his novels, including The Joke (1967), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), all of which exhibit his extreme though often comical skepticism.
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Combine Editions

Average rating: 4.01 · 905,215 ratings · 61,303 reviews · 151 distinct works • Similar authors
The Unbearable Lightness of...
4.10 avg rating — 551,345 ratings — published 1984 — 476 editions
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The Book of Laughter and Fo...
3.94 avg rating — 54,712 ratings — published 1979 — 43 editions
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Immortality
4.14 avg rating — 43,515 ratings — published 1990 — 2 editions
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The Joke
4.03 avg rating — 41,065 ratings — published 1967 — 10 editions
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Laughable Loves
3.80 avg rating — 39,600 ratings — published 1963 — 221 editions
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Identity
3.69 avg rating — 33,795 ratings — published 1997 — 4 editions
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Ignorance
3.81 avg rating — 28,230 ratings — published 2000 — 2 editions
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Life is Elsewhere
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3.96 avg rating — 21,932 ratings — published 1973 — 5 editions
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Slowness
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3.60 avg rating — 22,937 ratings — published 1995 — 6 editions
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Farewell Waltz
3.87 avg rating — 20,345 ratings — published 1972 — 9 editions
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More books by Milan Kundera…
Quotes by Milan Kundera  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.”
― Milan Kundera
7643 likes
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“You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.”
― Milan Kundera
3890 likes
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“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
tags: goals, success
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Polls

February 2017 Revisit the Shelf Reread Poll

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, 311 pages, 1985
 
  66 votes, 23.4%

 
  46 votes, 16.3%

 
  34 votes, 12.1%

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, 521 pages, 1854
 
  32 votes, 11.3%

 
  22 votes, 7.8%

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, 1463 pages, 1862
 
  20 votes, 7.1%

 
  19 votes, 6.7%

Dune by Frank Herbert, 604 pages, 1965
 
  18 votes, 6.4%

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, 213 pages, 1930
 
  16 votes, 5.7%

Rob Roy by Walter Scott, 501 pages, 1817
 
  5 votes, 1.8%

The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk, 560 pages, 1951
 
  4 votes, 1.4%

282 total votes
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