3 best books by Milan Kundera

al already gone Milan Kundera, or rather his work, I randomly approached getting lost in my parents' library. Those were my adolescent days in which books began to be more than decorative elements.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being came to be a initiatory work towards the existentialism of a young man. That kid that I was was beginning to glimpse heavy questions that were compensated with the lightness of an age devoted to other things...

In that magical balance of life to be discovered, this Czech guy appeared, a true genius who will always be missed at the level of a Jose Luis Sampedro, looking for a national parallelism in the transcendence of its plots.

Unforgettable Kundera with his initially rhetorical questions that in the end obtained an answer, an answer that exposed you naked to your own nascent doubts about what it is to exist, about what it is to achieve a piece of immortality in the cadence of seconds propitious for it.

Undoubtedly a very special author for me whose ranking of three fundamental novels (highly recommended), are marked by that first reading already mentioned.

Top 3 Recommended Novels by Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

A novel that would go to a hypothetical end along with many others in a final selection of world literature. Where that unbearable lightness announced by the title is most marked is in love, or rather in the following heartbreak that feels incapable of recovering what it was.

Mixing love and philosophy is like uniting passion and reason, being able to narrate it is something like writing about the entire human existence. And from that simple and slight notion is this book that I have already indicated: The particular moments or the existence in general.

Try to achieve dreams or immerse yourself in the magic of the moment that passes. Impossible balances of the mere fact of being. You will never find a novel with philosophical overtones that allows you to access the most sophisticated ideas so lightly, those that plan around the existence of our feelings and our world as an almost inseparable perception.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The inmortality

I'm going to be predictable, enormously predictable. But it is that great works have a difficult discussion. And if they come two by two, then in the end it is a matter of chance what determines the first and second place.

From this novel I keep the idea of ​​Agnes. An image of the woman who poses for the story, who seems to overact but is really only trying to make you see that immortality of the moment. The moment he looks at you and the precise moment he says goodbye. Agnes marks the times from here to eternity.

It is about learning to discern those subjective images that stop our world to approach an Olympus of gods in full existence, just before losing our footing and sinking back into the valley.

And once again philosophy, the wisdom of distinguished minds in history that stopped at some point to contemplate the grace of the gesture. Western wisdom to discover that nothing is known when magic happens.

As a counterweight to history, we meet Professor Avenarius, capable of letting go of his mortality complexes to indulge in oblivion and the foolish attempt to prolong the beauty of the ephemeral.

book-immortality

The curtain

Kundera's motives for indulging in literature as a channel to shake up his philosophy to the world. The old question about why writing is justified in the history of literature itself, in the feeling immortalized in works by gigantic writers.

«Only the great art of the novel is capable of tearing for an instant the curtain of prejudices and pre-interpretations with which we decipher not only our life but the entire history of humanity.

Moreover, perhaps the novel is the last observatory that allows us to embrace human existence as a whole and to take "a look at the soul of things."

The novelist and essayist Milan Kundera invites us on the curtain to participate in the secret dialogue between the great names of Western tradition.

Some works illuminate others, the writers discover unusual aspects in their predecessors, which in turn will inspire their successors in very different ways: Rabelais, Cervantes, Diderot, Fielding, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, García Márquez ... The result is a small and particular literary "pleiad" that Kundera shares with readers and an illuminating personal history of literature. "

The curtain

Other recommended books by Milan Kundera

A hijacked West

Considering Kundera one of the most brilliant European writers of the XNUMXth century, trying to recover sociological notions of the European XNUMXth century without counting on him would be to leave behind all that literature that contains the most real account of events. And as usually happens with what is written by minds as distinguished as Kundera's, recovering certain texts implies the discovery of self-fulfilling prophecies in substance and form...

Czech culture in the 1967s enjoyed surprising vitality: literature, theater and cinema displayed exceptional originality and diversity, in stark contrast to the accelerated decomposition of political structures and the onslaught of strict censorship. This work contains two texts by the great Czech intellectual: his speech before the XNUMX Writers' Congress, in which he courageously advocated for the autonomy of culture and the freedom of creators, and A hijacked West (1983), a long article that at the time provoked a lively political debate in the main European cultural publications.

In the context of his small country, in the midst of a communist dictatorship, the author wonders about the weight of barbarism in history and in the lives of human beings, and in a premonitory way, warns of the threats from Russia (then the Union Soviet) versus the rest of Europe.

A hijacked West
5/5 - (9 votes)

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.