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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 His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.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 · 935,404 ratings · 65,141 reviews · 171 distinct works • Similar authors
The Unbearable Lightness of...
4.10 avg rating — 570,766 ratings — published 1984 — 477 editions
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The Book of Laughter and Fo...
3.94 avg rating — 55,879 ratings — published 1979 — 14 editions
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Immortality
4.14 avg rating — 44,602 ratings — published 1990 — 3 editions
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The Joke
4.03 avg rating — 42,348 ratings — published 1967 — 50 editions
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Laughable Loves
3.79 avg rating — 40,959 ratings — published 1979 — 34 editions
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Identity
3.69 avg rating — 35,002 ratings — published 1997
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Ignorance
3.81 avg rating — 29,139 ratings — published 2000 — 4 editions
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Life is Elsewhere
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3.96 avg rating — 22,497 ratings — published 1973 — 149 editions
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Slowness
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3.60 avg rating — 23,701 ratings — published 1995 — 3 editions
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Farewell Waltz
3.87 avg rating — 21,096 ratings — published 1972 — 205 editions
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More books by Milan Kundera…

Related News

Batter Gray has a poetry problem. Batter finds himself, a recent college graduate in 1980s New York City, with zero skills beyond having the...
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15 likes · 0 comments
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
7649 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
3893 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
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Polls

June 2021 Revisit the Shelf Poll

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro pub. 1989, 258 pp., last read Sept 2018
 
  54 votes, 21.7%

Tess of The D'ubervilles by Thomas Hardy pub. 1891, 518 pp., last read June 2018
 
  52 votes, 20.9%

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson pub. 1883, 311 pp., last read 2011
 
  39 votes, 15.7%

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera 320 pages, pub. 1984, last read Dec. 2012
 
  37 votes, 14.9%

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe last read 2/2015, 209 pp., pub 1958
 
  24 votes, 9.6%

Shirley by Charlotte Brontë 624 pp., pub. 1849, last read Dec. 2018
 
  22 votes, 8.8%

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury pub 1950, 182 pp. last read March 2016
 
  21 votes, 8.4%

249 total votes
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