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Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera


Born
in Brno, Czechia, Czech Republic
April 01, 1929

Died
July 11, 2023

Genre
Literature & Fiction

Influences
Robert Musil, Witold Gombrowicz, Sterne, Diderot, François Rabelais, H ...more


Milan Kundera (1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Czech and French novelist. He went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.

Kundera wrote in Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; people therefore consider these original works as not translations. He is best known for his novels, including The Joke (1967), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), all of which exhibit his extreme though often comical skepticism.
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Combine Editions

Average rating: 4.01 · 885,745 ratings · 59,048 reviews · 183 distinct works • Similar authors
The Unbearable Lightness of...
4.11 avg rating — 538,972 ratings — published 1984 — 12 editions
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The Book of Laughter and Fo...
3.95 avg rating — 53,993 ratings — published 1979 — 213 editions
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Immortality
4.14 avg rating — 42,803 ratings — published 1990 — 6 editions
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The Joke
4.03 avg rating — 40,283 ratings — published 1967 — 258 editions
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Laughable Loves
3.81 avg rating — 38,714 ratings — published 1963 — 5 editions
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Identity
3.69 avg rating — 33,008 ratings — published 1997 — 179 editions
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Ignorance
3.81 avg rating — 27,691 ratings — published 2000 — 168 editions
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Life is Elsewhere
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3.96 avg rating — 21,309 ratings — published 1973 — 10 editions
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Slowness
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3.60 avg rating — 22,471 ratings — published 1995 — 3 editions
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Farewell Waltz
3.87 avg rating — 19,910 ratings — published 1972 — 201 editions
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More books by Milan Kundera…
Quotes by Milan Kundera  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.”
― Milan Kundera
7645 likes
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“You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.”
― Milan Kundera
3893 likes
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“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
tags: goals, success
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Polls

August 2021 Revisit the Shelf Poll

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera 320 pages, pub. 1984, last read Dec. 2012
 
  41 votes, 19.8%

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky pub. 1869, 667 pp. last read April 2016
 
  32 votes, 15.5%

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler pub 1979, 287 pp, last read May 2019
 
  28 votes, 13.5%

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins pub 1868, 528 pg. Last read May 2015
 
  27 votes, 13.0%

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. pub. 1969, pp. 275, last read Sept. 2017
 
  27 votes, 13.0%

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling pub. 1893, 227 pages, Group read 2017
 
  26 votes, 12.6%

The Plague by Albert Camus pub. 1947, 308 pages, Group read June 2015
 
  26 votes, 12.6%

207 total votes
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