In 2014, British novelist and enfant terrible of English literature, Will Self, wrote an article for The Guardian newspaper, titled ‘The Fate of Our Literary Culture is Sealed’. In it, he asserted that, in the digital age, the serious novel was losing its cultural primacy and centrality and the idea of difficult reading was being challenged.

About a year earlier, in 2013, Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera had published his 11th and last work of fiction, a novella titled La fête de l’insignifiance, translated into English in 2015 as The Festival of Insignificance.

Although it failed to elicit a rapturous reception compared to most of his previous novels, such as The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, it did not diminish Kundera’s stature as, arguably, the greatest writer to have come out of Europe in the latter half of the 20th century.

The Franco-Czech writer who passed away on July 11 at the age of 94 was arguably the most quoted novelist ever and made the simplest of facts sound profound and the deepest of truths come across as self-evident

Lines from The Festival of Insignificance were oft quoted and the book’s characters were analysed fervently, in a way negating Self’s assertion. After all, this was Milan Kundera, one of the ardent defenders of the genre, who had eloquently espoused, “The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.” It is worth noting that a good number of reviewers missed Kundera’s smart take on old age through a character in the novella; he knew people were going to discuss his ‘lost touch’ as a novelist in his twilight years.

How did Kundera manage to build such a formidable reputation for himself? Simple: by masterfully running three mutually reinforcing strands — the political, the philosophical and the erotic — through his novels and his dazzling collection of seven short stories, Smesne Lasky, published in the original Czech in 1969, with its English translation, Laughable Loves, coming out in 1974. He made the simplest of facts sound profound and the deepest of truths come across as self-evident, if not perfunctory.

Kundera was born in Brno, in the former Czechoslovakia on April 1, 1929. He studied music, literature and aesthetics and taught world literature at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Prague. In his younger days, he wrote poetry and drama. Later, he became a journalist and started dabbling in fiction.

In 1967, he published his first novel, Zert [The Joke], which, despite the book’s success, landed him in trouble. The novel cocks a snook at communist repression in a way that was familiar to Kundera — twice he was ousted from the Communist Party. The Joke’s protagonist makes a joke about Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky thinking that it will help him woo a girl. The little jape snowballs into a gigantic mess.

After Russia’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, the novel was taken off the shelves and Kundera was hounded by the authorities. In 1975, he emigrated to France and stayed there till he breathed his last on July 11 this year in Paris, aged 94. In the last four decades that he lived, he wrote in French, publishing La Lenteur [Slowness] in 1995, L’Identité [Identity] in 1998 and L’ignorance [Ignorance] in 2000. In 2019, his Czech nationality, of which he was stripped in 1979, was restored.

Kundera didn’t get instant international recognition. He wasn’t happy with the English translations of The Joke in 1969 and the early ’70s. It was the arrival in 1979 on the bookstands of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting — written in Czech, but published in French as Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli — that turned him into a shining star of literature, a position enhanced manifold by the publication of The Unbearable Lightness of Being in 1984.

The former was about the ruling elite’s attempt at tampering with, and erasing, memory. The latter explores the themes of liberty and infidelity against the backdrop of the Prague Spring, leading up to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. However, that’s not how readers chiefly remember and celebrate the two books.

Kundera weaves his tales by first treating his characters in separate streams of subjects, usually in seven chapters, then dazzlingly brings those streams together to form a cascading waterfall of ideas brimming with heavy philosophical concepts and titillating narrative touches. It is astounding how profusely lines from these two novels are quoted by his admirers all over the world.

For example, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”, from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, was once the mantra of most budding and a decent number of accomplished writers. From The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it was “Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”

Eminent Urdu poet Iftikhar Arif is spot on when he says that Kundera is the most quoted novelist ever — he is quoted more than Jean Paul Sartre.

The novel that examines the human condition with a remarkable degree of soulfulness is Immortality. Here, Kundera, keeping true to his brainy self, focuses on the essence of existence and gives lovers of literature and philosophy an immortal pearl of wisdom: “The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.”

The writer’s in-depth knowledge of, and a consuming passion for, Western literature had often made him write about the genre that he practised and became known for. His collection of essays The Art of the Novel is a highly influential thesis on narrative prose that some believe is an even more insightful work than English writer E.M. Forster’s book Aspects of the Novel.

That may be debatable, but Kundera’s terribly under-discussed book of 2009, Encounter: Essays, solidified his position as one of the finest, if not the finest, literary critic of his generation. His ability to get to the crux of a text with a clear understanding of its socio-political and cultural genesis was unmatched, blurring the line between literary criticism and creative nonfiction.

Here’s a piece of evidence. While writing about Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Kundera gives his essay the title ‘The Comical Absence of the Comical’. In its opening paragraph he writes: “The dictionary defines laughter as a reaction ‘provoked by something amusing or comical’. But is that so? We could draw up a whole anthology of different kinds of laughter from The Idiot. A curious thing: the characters who laugh most in the book are not the ones with the greatest sense of humour; on the contrary, they are those who have none at all.”

What an uncomplicated and delightful way of examining a text sans any kind of faux erudition!

This is where Kundera’s genius in fiction and criticism lies: his stories contain cerebral scholarliness emanating from everyday goings-on and coming out of the mouths of identifiable characters, and his analyses brim with intellect that is communicable even to a literary ignoramus.

The writer is a member of staff

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 23rd, 2023