FBI UNDERCOVER AGENT APARTMENT BOOK FICTION 2008 ARCHIVE
In 2021, Kundera donated his private library and archive to the public library in Brno, where he was born and spent his childhood. I ask myself, do they even read books anymore? It’s possible, but for how much longer?” They gesticulate, they should, they look at no one and no one looks at them. “People walk in the street, they no longer have contact with those around them, they don’t even see the homes they pass, they have wires hanging from their ears.
It’s because of this anguish that, for several years now, I have in all my contracts a clause stipulating that they must be published only in the traditional form of a book, that they be read only on paper and not on a screen,” he said. “It seems to me that time, which continues its march pitilessly, is beginning to endanger books. In a June 2012 speech to the French National Library - re-read on French radio by a friend - he said he feared for the future of literature. It was she who fostered his friendship with Roth by serving as their linguistic go-between, and - according to a 1985 profile of the couple - it was she who handled the inevitable demands on a world-famous author. Kundera’s wife, Vera, was an essential companion to the man who eschewed technology - his translator, his social secretary, and ultimately his buffer against the outside world. Kundera ultimately won the State Award for Literature for it. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’’ which won him such acclaim and was made into a film in 1988, was not published in the Czech Republic until 2006, 17 years after the Velvet Revolution, although it was available in Czech since 1985 from a compatriot who founded a publishing house in exile in Canada. His works, eventually written in French, were belatedly translated into Czech. He returned to the Czech Republic rarely and incognito, even after the fall of the Iron Curtain. To say his relationship with the land of his birth was complex would be an understatement. In 1989, the Velvet Revolution pushed Communists from power and Kundera’s nation was reborn as the Czech Republic, but by then he had made a new life - and a complete identity - in his apartment on Paris’ Left Bank. A man knows he is mortal, but he takes it for granted that his nation possesses a kind of eternal life,” he told the author Philip Roth in a New York Times interview in 1980, the year before he became a naturalized French citizen.
“If someone had told me as a boy: One day you will see your nation vanish from the world, I would have considered it nonsense, something I couldn’t possibly imagine. Weaving together themes of love and exile, politics and the deeply personal, Kundera’s novel won critical acclaim, earning him a wide readership among Westerners who embraced both his anti-Soviet subversion and the eroticism threaded through many of his works. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’’ Kundera’s best-known novel, opens wrenchingly with Soviet tanks rolling through Prague, the Czech capital that was the author’s home until he moved to France in 1975.
“I dream of a world where writers are obliged by law to keep their identity secret and use pseudonyms,” he wrote in the 1986 essay, “The Art of the Novel.” Kundera used the sentence to respond to questions put to him in 2011 by Le Monde des Livres, agreeing to an “interview” via responses from his works. Kundera was a man of few words whose novels were translated into dozens of languages, but he abhorred the publicity that came with it, refusing interviews. Kundera held both French and Czech nationality, which he lost and then regained. The European Parliament held a moment of silence upon news of his passing.
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