Kundera Life Is Elsewhere

Kundera's "Life Is Elsewhere": A Journey Through Existentialism and the Search for Meaning

Introduction:

Milan Kundera's Life Is Elsewhere isn't just a novel; it's a visceral exploration of artistic ambition, the pitfalls of idealism, and the elusive nature of authenticity. This post delves deep into Kundera's masterpiece, analyzing its complex characters, thematic layers, and lasting impact. We'll unpack the novel's central conflicts, explore its poignant portrayal of the search for meaning in a chaotic world, and examine how Kundera masterfully intertwines politics, art, and the human condition. Whether you're a seasoned Kundera aficionado or a curious newcomer, this comprehensive guide will equip you with a deeper understanding of this compelling and often challenging work. Prepare for a journey into the heart of existential angst and the relentless pursuit of a "life elsewhere."

I. The Illusion of Artistic Glory: Jaromil's Obsession

Jaromil, the novel's protagonist, embodies the youthful romanticism that often fuels artistic aspirations. His obsession with poetry and his yearning for recognition drive much of the narrative. However, Kundera subtly critiques this naive pursuit of glory, highlighting the often-painful disconnect between artistic vision and the harsh realities of the world. Jaromil's early poems, infused with revolutionary fervor, reflect the political climate of Czechoslovakia in the 1940s. His idealistic belief in the power of art to change the world quickly clashes with the complexities of political realities and the mundane struggles of daily life. This disillusionment forms a crucial element of the novel's exploration of the gap between expectation and reality. His artistic journey, filled with both triumphs and crushing failures, becomes a metaphor for the broader human search for purpose and fulfillment.

II. Politics and the Absurdity of Ideals:

Life Is Elsewhere is deeply rooted in the socio-political context of post-war Czechoslovakia. Kundera masterfully weaves political events into the narrative, demonstrating how political ideologies can both inspire and ultimately betray individual ideals. Jaromil's early embrace of communism, fueled by his romantic notions of revolution, eventually crumbles under the weight of its inherent contradictions and brutal realities. This disillusionment is not unique to Jaromil; it reflects the broader experience of many intellectuals and artists in the era, grappling with the compromises and betrayals inherent in aligning their artistic vision with political agendas. The novel subtly critiques the seductive power of utopian ideals and their potential to mask harsh realities.

III. The Search for Authenticity in a World of Masks:

Kundera's characters often struggle with the tension between their public personas and their true selves. They wear masks to conform to societal expectations and political pressures, leading to a sense of alienation and profound existential unease. Jaromil, caught between his artistic ambitions and the demands of the communist party, constantly grapples with this conflict. His desperate search for authenticity becomes the driving force of his life, leading him down a path of self-discovery filled with both exhilaration and despair. This search is mirrored in the experiences of other characters, highlighting the universal human desire for genuine self-expression in a world that often pressures conformity.

IV. Love, Loss, and the Elusive Nature of Happiness:

The novel explores the complexities of love and relationships, demonstrating how even the most passionate connections can be fraught with conflict and disillusionment. Jaromil's romantic pursuits are often intertwined with his artistic aspirations, leading to both profound emotional highs and crushing disappointments. His relationships are not merely romantic entanglements; they are a significant part of his personal journey of self-discovery. The novel highlights the challenges of finding lasting happiness and the inherent instability of human connections. The transient nature of love becomes another aspect of the broader existential themes explored throughout the book.

V. The Power and Limitations of Art:

Life Is Elsewhere is, at its core, a novel about art itself. It explores the power of art to express profound truths, to challenge power structures, and to offer glimpses of meaning in a chaotic world. However, it also acknowledges the inherent limitations of art. Art cannot, in itself, solve life's problems or provide definitive answers to existential questions. Jaromil's relentless pursuit of artistic recognition becomes a double-edged sword, both fueling his creative drive and ultimately leading to a profound sense of existential despair. The novel suggests that while art can be a powerful tool for self-expression and understanding, it cannot be a substitute for authentic living.

VI. Conclusion: The Acceptance of "Here"

The novel's ending suggests a gradual acceptance of reality. While Jaromil's initial quest for a "life elsewhere" – a life of artistic glory and unadulterated freedom – proves elusive, he eventually learns to find a degree of peace and acceptance in the present. This doesn't necessarily equate to happiness, but rather a recognition of the inherent complexities and ambiguities of existence. The "life elsewhere" he sought was not a geographical location or a state of perpetual bliss, but rather a projection of his own desires and ambitions. The novel ultimately suggests that true fulfillment may come not from escaping reality but from engaging with it, warts and all.

Outline of Life Is Elsewhere

Name: Life Is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera

Contents:

Introduction: Setting the stage for Jaromil's artistic journey and the socio-political context.
Part I: The Early Years: Jaromil's youthful idealism, early artistic endeavors, and encounters with the communist regime.
Part II: The Rise and Fall: His involvement with the communist party, his evolving artistic style, and his experiences with love and loss.
Part III: Disillusionment and Self-Discovery: Jaromil's growing awareness of the limitations of his ideals and his struggles with authenticity.
Conclusion: A reflection on Jaromil's journey and the broader themes of the novel.

Detailed Explanation of Outline Points:

1. Introduction: The introduction establishes Jaromil as a young, ambitious poet deeply influenced by the political climate of post-war Czechoslovakia. It highlights the tension between artistic aspirations and the realities of political oppression.

2. Part I: The Early Years: This section focuses on Jaromil's formative years, his early poems reflecting his revolutionary idealism, his involvement with the communist youth movement, and his first experiences with love and loss. It introduces the key thematic elements that will be explored throughout the novel.

3. Part II: The Rise and Fall: This part chronicles Jaromil's rise within the artistic circles of the communist party, his growing disillusionment with the regime, and his struggles with his artistic identity. It showcases the complexities of his relationships, highlighting the tension between romantic love and political realities.

4. Part III: Disillusionment and Self-Discovery: Jaromil confronts the limitations of his past beliefs and begins a process of self-discovery, questioning his artistic choices and his place in the world. This section delves deeper into the novel's existential themes, exploring the search for authenticity and meaning in a world of ambiguity.

5. Conclusion: The conclusion offers a reflection on Jaromil's journey, summarizing the central themes of the novel and offering a poignant observation on the nature of human experience, the pursuit of happiness, and the acceptance of reality.

FAQs:

1. What is the central theme of Life Is Elsewhere? The central theme revolves around the search for authenticity and meaning in a world marked by political oppression and the disillusionment of idealistic youth.

2. Who is Jaromil, and what is his significance? Jaromil is the protagonist, a poet whose relentless pursuit of artistic glory and a "life elsewhere" drives the narrative. He represents the struggle of artists to reconcile their creative aspirations with the demands of reality.

3. How does the novel portray the political climate of post-war Czechoslovakia? It portrays the political climate as oppressive and deceitful, exposing the contradictions and hypocrisies of the communist regime.

4. What role does love play in the novel? Love serves as a source of both joy and pain, reflecting the complexities of human relationships and the search for connection in a turbulent world.

5. What is the significance of the title, Life Is Elsewhere? It highlights Jaromil's relentless pursuit of a life beyond the mundane realities he faces, symbolizing the human desire for fulfillment and escape from the constraints of everyday existence.

6. Is the novel a criticism of communism? While not explicitly anti-communist, the novel offers a critique of totalitarian regimes and their impact on individual lives and artistic expression.

7. How does Kundera use irony and satire in the novel? Kundera masterfully employs irony and satire to expose the hypocrisy and absurdity of political ideologies and their impact on the human condition.

8. What is the novel's overall tone? The overall tone is melancholic yet insightful, reflecting the complexities of the human experience and the elusive nature of happiness and fulfillment.

9. What makes Life Is Elsewhere significant in literary history? It's a significant work of postmodern literature that explores the complexities of identity, politics, and art in a powerful and thought-provoking way.

Related Articles:

1. Milan Kundera's Literary Style and Techniques: An exploration of Kundera's unique writing style and the literary devices he employed in Life Is Elsewhere.

2. The Existential Themes in Life Is Elsewhere: A deeper analysis of the existential questions explored in the novel, focusing on themes of meaning, authenticity, and freedom.

3. The Political Context of Life Is Elsewhere: A historical overview of post-war Czechoslovakia and its influence on the novel's narrative.

4. Jaromil's Artistic Journey in Life Is Elsewhere: A close reading of Jaromil's artistic development and the evolution of his poetic style.

5. Love and Relationships in Life Is Elsewhere: An examination of the various romantic relationships in the novel and their significance to the overarching narrative.

6. Comparing Life Is Elsewhere to Other Kundera Novels: A comparative analysis of Life Is Elsewhere with Kundera's other works, highlighting similarities and differences.

7. The Role of Irony and Satire in Life Is Elsewhere: A detailed analysis of Kundera's use of irony and satire to critique political ideologies and societal norms.

8. Critical Reception of Life Is Elsewhere: An overview of critical reviews and interpretations of the novel from its publication to the present day.

9. Adaptations and Interpretations of Life Is Elsewhere: An exploration of any stage or film adaptations of the novel and how they have interpreted its key themes.

kundera life is elsewhere: Life is Elsewhere Milan Kundera, 2000 Out of print since 1987, Life Is Elsewhere is available again in an outstanding new translation. Kundera's epic of adolescence tenderly erodes such sacrosanct values as childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry, in a remarkable portrait of an artist as a young man (Newsweek).
kundera life is elsewhere: Life Is Elsewhere Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher, 2023-06-27 I will say no more about this lacerating book except to urge it upon all who care about literature in our difficult era. — Boston Globe A sly and merciless lampoon of revolutionary romanticism. . . Kundera commits some of the funniest literary savaging since Evelyn Waugh polished off Dickens in A Handful of Dust.— Time Milan Kundera initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to him, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent (innocence with its bloody smile!), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He's no creep, he's Rimbaud. Rimbaud entrapped by the communist revolution, entrapped in a somber farce.
kundera life is elsewhere: The Festival of Insignificance Milan Kundera, 2023-07-18 “Slender but weighty. . . . What is moving about this novel is its embrace of what has always driven Kundera, the delicate state of living between being and nothingness.”— Boston Globe From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an entertaining and enchanting novel—a fitting capstone on an extraordinary career. (Slate) Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realism—that’s The Festival of Insignificance. Readers who know Milan Kundera’s earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the “unserious” in a novel is not at all unexpected of him. In Immortality, Goethe and Hemingway stroll through several chapters together talking and laughing. And in Slowness, Vera, the author’s wife, says to her husband: “you’ve often told me you meant to write a book one day that would have not a single serious word in it…I warn you: watch out. Your enemies are lying in wait.” Kundera is finally and fully realizing his old aesthetic dream in this novel that we could easily view as a summation of his whole work. A strange sort of summation. Strange sort of epilogue. Strange sort of laughter, inspired by our time, which is comical because it has lost all sense of humor. What more can we say? Nothing. Just read.
kundera life is elsewhere: Immortality Milan Kundera, 2020-11-09 The New York Times bestseller by the author of legendary cult classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'Like all great writers, Kundera leaves indelible marks on his readers' imaginations.' Salman Rushdie From a playful gesture between an old woman in a swimming pool and a youthful lifeguard springs the heroine of a novel: Agnès. In the course of her daily life - Saturday chores, saunas, lunch in the hectic Paris streets - memories arise of her dead father, an unexpected widower. Their conversations flood back, and Agnès realises that her secret inheritance was his way of granting her freedom. As s he mentally revisits her childhood, from formative loves to her intense relationship with her sister, her past casts light on her present: her marriage, daughter, and eventual death. Exploring identity and existence, eroticism and modernity - with cameos from Goethe, Dali, Hemingway, and beyond - Immortality illuminates the nature of selfhood with inimitable wit, grace and intellectual nimbleness. 'A serial feast, a banquet for the brain.' Observer 'A joy to read. Wise, rueful, whimsically philosophical, Kundera teases the reader with provocations and paradoxes.' Evening Standard
kundera life is elsewhere: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera, 2023-03-28 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.
kundera life is elsewhere: Farewell Waltz Milan Kundera, 2020-10-09 A dazzling tragicomic tale from the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'Anyone reading Kundera's books is unlikely to forget them. They have an essential energy, a difference.' New Statesman 'Kundera is a self-confessed hedonist in a world beset by politics . . . Marvellous.' Salman Rushdie Klima, a celebrated jazz trumpeter, learns that a young nurse with whom he spent one brief night at a fertility spa is pregnant - and she has decided he is the father. Thus begins a whirlwind farce as he returns to the spa: an accelerating dance which unfolds over five madcap days, encompassing Klima's jealous wife, the nurse's equally jealous boyfriend, a fanatical gynaecologist, a rich American (at once Don Juan and saint) and an elderly political prisoner who is holding a farewell party before emigration. Posing serious philosophical questions with his inimitable blasphemous lightness, Farewell Waltz is perhaps the most purely entertaining of Kundera's novels, rich in black humour and profound human insights.
kundera life is elsewhere: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera, 2023-03-28 “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.
kundera life is elsewhere: Encounter Milan Kundera, 2010-08-17 Milan Kundera's collection of essays is a defense of the arts in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. --From publisher description.
kundera life is elsewhere: Ignorance Milan Kundera, 2023-05-23 “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.
kundera life is elsewhere: The JOKE Milan Kundera, 1993-02-26 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.
kundera life is elsewhere: The Curtain Milan Kundera, 2023-07-18 “An elegant, personalized integration of anecdote, analysis, scholarship, memory and speculation. . . . Not since Henry James, perhaps, has a fiction writer examined the process of writing with such insight, authority and range of reference and allusion.” —Russell Banks, New York Times Book Review “A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.” In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the art of the novel, renowned author Milan Kundera suggests that “the curtain” represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has—a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides. Here an incomparable literary artist cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. In doing so, he celebrates a prose form that possesses the unique ability to transcend national and language boundaries in order to reveal some previously unknown aspect of human existence.
kundera life is elsewhere: The Art of the Novel Milan Kundera, 2023-06-27 “Incites us to reflect on fiction and philosophy, knowledge and truth, and brilliantly illustrates the art of the essay.” — The New Republic Every novelist's work contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel, an idea of what the novel is. I have tried to express the idea of the novel that is inherent in my own novels. — Milan Kundera Kundera brilliantly examines the evolution, construction, and essence of the novel as an art form through the lens of his own work and through the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Musil, Kafka, and perhaps the least known of all the great novelists of our time, Hermann Broch. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the post-psychological novel.
kundera life is elsewhere: Identity Milan Kundera, 2023-04-25 Kundera, master of the twosome, finds erotic and existential threads everywhere in daily behavior. Like his previous books, Identity is a cluster of jeweled observations. . . . But Identity has a special charm: suspense. . . . [It] gets us turning the pages in excitement and alarm, and Kundera's wit keeps us turning them to the very end. — San Francisco Chronicle In a narrative as intense as it is brief, a moment of confusion sets in motion a complex chain of events which forces the reader to cross and recross the divide between fantasy and reality. Sometimes—perhaps only for an instant—we fail to recognize a companion; for a moment their identity ceases to exist, and thus we come to doubt our own. The effect is at its most acute in a couple, where our existence is given meaning by our perception of a lover, and theirs of us. With his astonishing skill at building on and out from the significant moment, Milan Kundera has placed such a situation and the resulting wave of panic at the core of this novel. Hailed as a a fervent and compelling romance, a moving fable about the anxieties of love and separateness (Baltimore Sun), it is not to be missed.
kundera life is elsewhere: Testaments Betrayed Milan Kundera, 2023-06-27 A defense of fiction and a lesson in the art of reading. —New York Times Book Review Testaments Betrayed is to be savored paragraph by paragraph. . . . It must be purchased, read, pondered, and argued within the margins. And frequently reread. — Washington Post A brilliant and thought-provoking essay from one of the twentieth century’s masters of fiction, Testaments Betrayed is written like a novel: the same characters appear and reappear throughout the nine parts of the book, as do the principal themes that preoccupy the author. Kundera is a passionate defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due a work of art and its creator’s wishes. The betrayal of both—often by their most passionate proponents—is one of the key ideas that informs this strikingly original and elegant book.
kundera life is elsewhere: Dead Connection Alafair Burke, 2014-09-30 The first Ellie Hatcher novel from the bestselling author of The Ex and The Wife * The Girl She Was, available to pre-order now* 'Highly addictive' KARIN SLAUGHTER 'A major talent' HARLAN COBEN Dating can be murder... Ellie Hatcher's father spent much of his life pursuing a notorious serial killer. So when, years later, a new killer emerges targeting single women online, Ellie willingly agrees to play victim in an attempt to trap him... In her first Ellie Hatcher series novel, Alafair Burke (author of All Day and A Night and City of Fear) unnervingly explores a world of stolen identities in which no-one is who they appear to be.
kundera life is elsewhere: Jacques and His Master Milan Kundera, 2023-07-18 A deliciously witty and entertaining variation on Diderot's novel Jacques le Fatalist, written for Milan Kundera's private pleasure in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. When the heavy Russian irrationality fell on Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera explains, he felt drawn to the spirit of the eighteenth century—And it seemed to me that nowhere was it to be found more densely concentrated than in that banquet of intelligence, humor, and fantasy, Jacques le Fataliste. The upshot was this Homage to Diderot, which has now been performed throughout the United States and Europe. Here, Jacques and His Master, newly translated by Simon Callow, is a text that will delight Kundera's admirers throughout the English-speaking world.
kundera life is elsewhere: Milan Kundera's Fiction Karen von Kunes, 2019-05-20 In Milan Kundera’s Fiction: A Critical Approach to Existential Betrayals, Karen von Kunes traces Kundera’s literary aspirations to a single episode in Czechoslovakia in the Stalinist era. This moment attracted international attention when a 1950 police report was released in 2008. Reporters rushed to judgment, accusing Kundera of denouncing Miroslav Dvořáček to the police, resulting in Dvořáček’s immediate arrest and sentencing to hard labor. von Kunes debunks this shocking charge in a systematic way and argues that Kundera reported a suitcase, not a man. She ties Kundera’s dominant themes of sex, betrayal, and political denouncement to the suitcase, a fatal instrument that can lead to paradoxes and unforeseen and catastrophic coincidences for his characters.
kundera life is elsewhere: Slowness Milan Kundera, 2023-04-25 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.
kundera life is elsewhere: The Farewell Party Milan Kundera, 1976 Published simultaneously with Identity, his new novel, here is a masterful new translation of Milan Kundera's most brilliantly plotted and sheerly entertaining novel -- a dark farce of sex, murder, and motherhood. Set in an Old-Fashioned Central European Spa Town, Farewell Waltz follows the lives of eight characters: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American who is at once a saint and a Don Juan; a popular trumpeter and his beautiful obsessively jealous wife; a disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young female ward. Perhaps the most accessible of Milan Kundera's novels, Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy. Translated from the French text prepared by the author himself a quarter century after the novel was originally written, Farewell Waltz sparkles anew with wit, humor, and irony. A valuable addition to HarperFlamingo's impressive Kundera backlist, it offers readers a chance to discover, or rediscover, one of the very best works of a legendary writer. It is hard to imagine anything more chilling and profound that Kundera's apparent lightheartedness. -- Elizabeth Pochoda Kundera ... remains faithful to this subtle, wily, devious talent for a fiction of 'erotic possibilities. -- New York Times Book Review
kundera life is elsewhere: Terra Nostra Carlos Fuentes, 2013-05-14 Terra Nostra is one of the great masterpieces of modern Latin American fiction. Concerned with nothing less than the history of Spain and of South America, with the Indian Gods and with Christianity, with the birth, the passion, and the death of civilizations, Fuentes's great novel is, indeed, that rare creation--the total work of art. Magnificently translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, Terra Nostra is, as Milan Kundera says in his afterword, the spreading out of the novel, the exploration of its possibilities, the voyage to the edge of what only a novelist can see and say.
kundera life is elsewhere: RecordCovid19 Kristopher Lovell, 2023-08-21 RecordCovid19. Historicizing Experiences of the Pandemic provides insights into the experience of the Covid19 pandemic from an historical and sociological perspective. Using the first-hand testimonies submitted as part of the #RecordCovid19 project as its inspiration, the chapters in this edited collection explore and contextualise the initial responses to the Covid19 pandemic. The collection examines people’s relationships with Covid19 as an historical event, including their own experiences of living through history; their relationship with their surroundings, including their relationships with family, the soundscapes and the emotional environments of a pandemic world; the impact and tone of political rhetoric, including the use (and misuse) of wartime myths and language in the United Kingdom; and finally, what lessons can be learnt from how people discuss their own personal stories and what lessons can we draw from previous examples of storytelling in moments of crisis. The result is a fascinating and rich discussion derived from an archive full of idiosyncratic experiences of life changing during the Covid19 pandemic.
kundera life is elsewhere: Life is Elsewhere Sohrab Hura, 2015 It was in the summer of 1999 when my mother was diagnosed with an acute case of Paranoid Schizophrenia. I was 17 then. The doctors, in retrospect, had said that she had already started developing the symptoms many years prior to that. Symptoms that nobody had noticed. But it was the break up with my father that caused her condition to suddenly come alive and then deteriorate. Over the years, the walls of our home started to peel off, people had stopped coming to our home because my mother was too scared to let anybody in and all that remained were the traces of a life that no longer existed. Our initial years were spent hiding from the world. Hers out of paranoia and mine out of embarrassment and anger at who she had become. But after all these years I ve realized that my mother had never stopped loving me. Today as I look back I realize who I am what I feel see and think is connected to my relationship with my mother in a way stronger than I know. And in this work I hope I am able to connect the relationship that I ve had with my mother with the rest of my life. Life is Elsewhere is a journal of my life, my family, my love, my friends, my travels, my sheer need to experience all that is about to disappear and so in a way I m attempting to connect my own life with the world that I see with a hope to find my reality in itLife is Elsewhere is a book of contradictions and of doubts and understandings and of laughter and forgetting in which I am trying to constantly question myself by simply documenting the broken fragments of my life which might seem completely disconnected to one another on their own. But I hope that in time I am able to piece together this wonderful jigsaw puzzle called life. And this journey will perhaps lead to reconciliation with my own life - Sohrab Hura
kundera life is elsewhere: Tworki Marek Bienczyk, 2008-02-27 In Tworki, a village just southwest of Warsaw, there is a psychiatric hospital and in that hospital, the patients and their caretakers are hidden from the war just outside their iron gates. Our hero, Jurek, answers an ad in the paper for a job there and finds himself keeping the books alongside a knockout strawberry blonde named Sonia. They and their group of friends—vital young people like Marcel, an initial rival for Jurek; Olek, Sonia’s chosen love; and Janka, with whom Jurek becomes involved—do their jobs, picnic on the weekends, and dance in the gardens on the grounds of the hospital. Jurek speaks often of, and even in, verse, whether he is talking to his friends or in letters to a distant and admiring cousin. He and his friends live lives that defy the discord and destruction of the war in Europe, striving to rediscover or save whatever beauty they can. Much of this beauty is embodied by Sonia, who is beloved of all the friends and patients at the asylum. But the revitalizing spring they all hope will come for Poland is not to arrive this year. Despite the relative safety of their odd surroundings, the world and the war soon come for the friends. Olek’s absences are longer and unexplained. Marcel is not what he seems, and he and his wife mysteriously disappear, she says, to the gas. And the perfection that Sonia embodies cannot ultimately be kept, by the friends, by the nation, or even by Sonia herself.
kundera life is elsewhere: Fra Keeler Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi, 2012-10-09 The debut novel from PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of Call Me Zebra and Savage Tongues is a comic psychological thriller, an absurdist journey into the heart of darkness. A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow stranger, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions.
kundera life is elsewhere: One Lark, One Horse Michael Hofmann, 2019-07-16 A new collection of poems by Michael Hofmann—his first in twenty years Michael Hofmann, renowned as one of our most brilliant critics and translators, is also regarded as among our most respected poets. Hofmann’s status—he is the author of “one of the definitive bodies of work of the last half-century (The Times Literary Supplement)—is all the more impressive for his relatively concentrated output. One Lark, One Horse is his fifth collection of poems since his debut in 1983, and his first since Approximately Nowhere in 1999. Tt is also one of the most anticipated gatherings of new work in years. In style, his voice is as unmistakable as ever—sometimes funny, sometimes caustic; world-facing and yet intimate—and this collection shows a bright mind burning fiercely over the European and American imaginations. The poet explores where he finds himself, geographically and in life, treating with wit and compassion such universal themes as aging and memory, place, and the difficult existence of the individual in an ever-bigger and more bestial world. One Lark, One Horse is a remarkable assemblage of work that will delight loyal readers and enchant new ones with Hofmann’s approachable, companionable voice.
kundera life is elsewhere: No Tomorrow Vivant Denon, 2009-10-13 A Bilingual New York Review Books Original Vivant Denon's No Tomorrow is one of the masterpieces of eighteenth-century French libertine literature, a book to set beside Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses, except that where Laclos' icy novel tells of hellish depravity, Denon's ravishing novella is a paradisal diversion. This tale of seduction is itself a seduction, with a plot that could be said to slowly unveil itself before arriving at last at an unexpected consummation. Summoned by Madame de T—— to her country house, the young hero of Denon's novella is taken on a tour of the grounds, only the beginning of a night that not only will be full of unanticipated delights but will give rise to unforeseen, perhaps unanswerable, questions. Lydia Davis's definitive translation of Denon's slim masterpiece is accompanied by the French text. Peter Brooks's illuminating introduction explores the mysteries of No Tomorrow's original publication and the subtleties of Denon's ethics of pleasure.
kundera life is elsewhere: Women and Men Joseph McElroy, 2023-01-17 Beginning in childbirth and entered like a multiple dwelling in motion, Women and Men embraces and anatomizes the 1970s in New York - from experiments in the chaotic relations between the sexes to the flux of the city itself. Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding fiction finds its way also across continents and into earlier and future times and indeed the Earth, to reveal connections between the most disparate lives and systems of feeling and power. At its breathing heart, it plots the fuguelike and fieldlike densities of late-twentieth-century life. McElroy rests a global vision on two people, apartment-house neighbors who never quite meet. Except, that is, in the population of others whose histories cross theirs believers and skeptics; lovers, friends, and hermits; children, parents, grandparents, avatars, and, apparently, angels. For Women and Men shows how the families through which we pass let one person's experience belong to that of many, so that we throw light on each other as if these kinships were refracted lives so real as to be reincarnate. A mirror of manners, the book is also a meditation on the languages, rich, ludicrous, exact, and also American, in which we try to grasp the world we're in. Along the kindred axes of separation and intimacy Women and Men extends the great line of twentieth-century innovative fiction.
kundera life is elsewhere: Laughable Loves Milan Kundera, 1999-08-25 Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road--only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone home to his wife. Games, fantasies, and schemes abound in all the stories while different characters react in varying ways to the sudden release of erotic impulses.
kundera life is elsewhere: The Human Stain Philip Roth, 2001-05-08 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral delivers “a master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled modern moment (The Wall Street Journal). It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, magnificently interwoven with the larger public history of modern America.
kundera life is elsewhere: The Yoga of Max's Discontent Karan Bajaj, 2016-05-03 “A beautifully rendered epic journey . . . . The novel works on many levels and excels at them all.” —New York Journal of Books In this captivating and surprising novel of spiritual discovery—a No. 1 bestseller in India—a young American travels to India and finds himself tested physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Max Pzoras is the poster child for the American Dream. The child of Greek immigrants who grew up in a dangerous New York housing project, he triumphed over his upbringing and became a successful Wall Street analyst. Yet on the frigid December night he’s involved in a violent street scuffle, Max begins to confront questions about suffering and mortality that have dogged him since his mother’s death. His search takes him to the farthest reaches of India, where he encounters a mysterious night market, almost freezes to death on a hike up the Himalayas, and finds himself in an ashram in a drought-stricken village in South India. As Max seeks answers to questions that have bedeviled him—can yogis walk on water and live for 200 years without aging? Can a flesh-and-blood man ever achieve nirvana?—he struggles to overcome his skepticism and the pull of family tugging him home. In an ultimate bid for answers, he embarks on a dangerous solitary meditation in a freezing Himalayan cave, where his physical and spiritual endurance is put to its most extreme test. By turns a gripping adventure story and a journey of tremendous inner transformation, The Yoga of Max's Discontent is a contemporary take on man's classic quest for transcendence.
kundera life is elsewhere: Necessary Errors Caleb Crain, 2013-08-06 ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS The Wall Street Journal • Slate • Kansas City Star • Flavorwire • Policy Mic • Buzzfeed “Necessary Errors is a very good novel, an enviably good one, and to read it is to relive all the anxieties and illusions and grand projects of one’s own youth.”—James Wood, The New Yorker The exquisite debut novel by the author of Overthrow that brilliantly captures the lives and romances of young expatriates in newly democratic Prague It’s October 1990. Jacob Putnam is young and full of ideas. He’s arrived a year too late to witness Czechoslovakia’s revolution, but he still hopes to find its spirit, somehow. He discovers a country at a crossroads between communism and capitalism, and a picturesque city overflowing with a vibrant, searching sense of possibility. As the men and women Jacob meets begin to fall in love with one another, no one turns out to be quite the same as the idea Jacob has of them—including Jacob himself. Necessary Errors is the long-awaited first novel from literary critic and journalist Caleb Crain. Shimmering and expansive, Crain’s prose richly captures the turbulent feelings and discoveries of youth as it stretches toward adulthood—the chance encounters that grow into lasting, unforgettable experiences and the surprises of our first ventures into a foreign world—and the treasure of living in Prague during an era of historic change.
kundera life is elsewhere: Dreams Of My Russian Summers Andrei Makine, 1998-08-27 This international bestseller has been translated into 26 languages and is the first work to win both of France's top literary honors. A masterpiece. . . . Makine belongs on the shelf of world literature--between Lermontov and Nabokov, a few volumes down from Proust.--The Atlanta Journal.
kundera life is elsewhere: Voices in the Snow Olga Andreyev Carlisle, 1962 Leonid Andreyev's grandaughter describes her meetings with Pasternak, Sholokhov, Ehrenburg, Evtushenko and young Soviet artists.--Taken from dust jacket.
kundera life is elsewhere: The Life of an Unknown Man Andreï Makine, 2012-06-05 A deeply moving meditation on memory, history, love, and art by the author of Dreams of My Russian Summers In The Life of an Unknown Man, Andreï Makine explores what truly matters in life through the prism of Russia's past and present. Shutov, a disenchanted writer, revisits St. Petersburg after twenty years of exile in Paris, hoping to recapture his youth. Instead, he meets Volsky, an old man who tells him his extraordinary story: of surviving the siege of Leningrad, the march on Berlin, and Stalin's purges, and of a transcendent love affair. Volsky's life is an inspiration to Shutov -- because for all that he suffered, he knew great happiness. This depth of feeling stands in sharp contrast to the empty lives Shutov encounters in the new Russia, and to his own life, that of just another unknown man . . .
kundera life is elsewhere: The Captive Mind Czesław Miłosz, 1959
kundera life is elsewhere: Franz Kafka Franz Kafka, 2009 Brings together, for the first time in English, Kafka's most interesting professional writings, composed during his years as a high-ranking lawyer with the largest Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in the Czech Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire--Publisher marketing.
kundera life is elsewhere: Augustus John Williams, 2014-08-19 WINNER OF THE 1973 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD By the Author of Stoner In Augustus, his third great novel, John Williams took on an entirely new challenge, a historical narrative set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire. To tell the story, Williams turned to the epistolary novel, a genre that was new to him, transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in Butcher’s Crossing and the campus novel in Stoner. Augustus is the final triumph of a writer who has come to be recognized around the world as an American master.
kundera life is elsewhere: House Of Blue Mangoes David Davidar, 2002-12 It Is The Last Year Of The Nineteenth Century In The Village Of Chevathar In Southern India. Solomon Dorai, The Headman, Is Desperately Trying To Hold Together The Fraying Ends Of Village Life At A Time Of Huge Social And Political Unease. When Violence Finally Erupts, It Takes Solomon And The Traditional Structure Of The Village With It. Three Generations Of Dorais Come And Go In The Village By The Sea, Winning And Losing The Battle For Chevathar. There Are Solomon S Sons: The Dazzling, Athletic Aaron And The Studious Daniel, Both Exiled By Their Father S Death But, In Different Ways, Both Determined To Make Their Mark On The World. And There Is Daniel S Son, Kannan, Faced With A Set Of Challenges That Could Break Him If He Isn T Strong Enough.
kundera life is elsewhere: No Saints or Angels Ivan Klíma, 2007-12-01 A novel of one desperate woman’s hopes and desires set in contemporary Prague from “a literary gem who is too little appreciated in the West” (The Boston Globe). Divorced, approaching fifty, and mother to a rebellious fifteen-year-old, Kristyna is beginning to feel the strain of her bleak existence—until she finds a new sense of joy when she begins a love affair with a man fifteen years her junior But her escape into romance is far from complete. She worries about her daughter Jana, who has been cutting school, and may be using heroin—the latest plague on the city. And Kristyna’s mother has forced her to accept the personal papers of her dead father, a tyrant whose Stalinist ideals she despised. At a crossroads in her life, she must find a way to put the past behind her and deal with the challenges of the present in a Czechoslovakia that is still trying to overcome years of communist oppression. In this Washington Post Best Book of 2001, Klima “unflinchingly presents the problems facing modern Prague and civilization in general . . . [and] fills it with mercy” (San Francisco Chronicle).
kundera life is elsewhere: The Death of the Artist William Deresiewicz, 2020-07-28 A deeply researched warning about how the digital economy threatens artists' lives and work—the music, writing, and visual art that sustain our souls and societies—from an award-winning essayist and critic There are two stories you hear about earning a living as an artist in the digital age. One comes from Silicon Valley. There's never been a better time to be an artist, it goes. If you've got a laptop, you've got a recording studio. If you've got an iPhone, you've got a movie camera. And if production is cheap, distribution is free: it's called the Internet. Everyone's an artist; just tap your creativity and put your stuff out there. The other comes from artists themselves. Sure, it goes, you can put your stuff out there, but who's going to pay you for it? Everyone is not an artist. Making art takes years of dedication, and that requires a means of support. If things don't change, a lot of art will cease to be sustainable. So which account is true? Since people are still making a living as artists today, how are they managing to do it? William Deresiewicz, a leading critic of the arts and of contemporary culture, set out to answer those questions. Based on interviews with artists of all kinds, The Death of the Artist argues that we are in the midst of an epochal transformation. If artists were artisans in the Renaissance, bohemians in the nineteenth century, and professionals in the twentieth, a new paradigm is emerging in the digital age, one that is changing our fundamental ideas about the nature of art and the role of the artist in society.