Understanding Milan Kundera PDF Download

Author: Fred Misurella
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063290693
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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"An absolutely dazzling entertainment. . . . Arousing on every level—political, erotic, intellectual, and above all, humorous." —Newsweek "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography. It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius." —New York Times Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.

Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063290642
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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“Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond.” — People In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples, a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing, and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine. This magnificent novel is a story of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, and encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.

Author: Bright Summaries
Publisher: BrightSummaries.com
ISBN: 2808002084
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 23

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Unlock the more straightforward side of The Unbearable Lightness of Being with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, an intricate, cyclical novel which charts the lives of Tomas, a successful surgeon, his wife Tereza, his lover Sabina, and Sabina’s lover Franz. The narrative skilfully blends the characters’ experiences of love, political activism and happiness with philosophical musings on the “lightness” of existence, creating an engaging novel which encourages readers to reflect on the meaning of their own lives. Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia, where he had a successful career as a university lecturer and author until the country was invaded by Soviet forces in 1968 following the Prague Spring. His books were banned by the Communist regime, and he moved to France in 1975. He has won a number of prestigious literary awards, including the Jerusalem Prize (1985) and the Czech State Literature Prize (2007). Find out everything you need to know about The Unbearable Lightness of Being in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: •A complete plot summary •Character studies •Key themes and symbols •Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063290685
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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“Kundera once more delivers a seductive, intelligent entertainment … [with] elegance and grace.” — Washington Post Book World “Nothing short of masterful.” — Newsweek A brilliant novel set in contemporary Prague, by one of the most distinguished writers of our time. A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier when they chose to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence “their memories no longer match.” We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion. Only those who return after 20 years, like Ulysses returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance first-hand. Kundera is the only author today who can take dizzying concepts such as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.

Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063290650
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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New York Times Bestseller "Inspired. . . . Kundera's most brilliantly imagined novel. . . . A book that entrances, beguiles and charms us from first page to last." — Cleveland Plain Dealer Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnès becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.

Author: Karen von Kunes
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498510817
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Karen von Kunes traces Milan Kundera’s creative ideas to a 1950 police report filed in Stalinist era Czechoslovakia. Demonstrating how this incident influenced Kundera’s literary trajectory and ultimately contributed to his acclaim as a writer, von Kunes interprets his work in a new way.

Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006099505X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence. The present edition provides English-language readers an important further means toward revaluation of The Joke. For reasons he describes in his Author's Note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating (with the assistance of his American publisher-editor) a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also to the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel's narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.

Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 143811334X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Presents a collection of critical essays about the work of Milan Kundera.

Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063290758
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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"Irresistible. . . . Slowness is an ode to sensuous leisure, to the enjoyment of pleasure rather than just the search for it." — Mirabella Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy.