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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 His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.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 · 938,196 ratings · 65,439 reviews · 171 distinct works • Similar authors
The Unbearable Lightness of...
4.10 avg rating — 572,508 ratings — published 1984 — 477 editions
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The Book of Laughter and Fo...
3.94 avg rating — 55,992 ratings — published 1979 — 217 editions
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Immortality
4.14 avg rating — 44,708 ratings — published 1990 — 23 editions
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The Joke
4.03 avg rating — 42,456 ratings — published 1967 — 30 editions
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Laughable Loves
3.79 avg rating — 41,088 ratings — published 1979 — 18 editions
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Identity
3.69 avg rating — 35,128 ratings — published 1997 — 185 editions
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Ignorance
3.81 avg rating — 29,235 ratings — published 2000 — 6 editions
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Life is Elsewhere
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3.96 avg rating — 22,546 ratings — published 1973 — 149 editions
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Slowness
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3.60 avg rating — 23,792 ratings — published 1995 — 182 editions
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Farewell Waltz
3.87 avg rating — 21,165 ratings — published 1972 — 4 editions
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More books by Milan Kundera…

Related News

Batter Gray has a poetry problem. Batter finds himself, a recent college graduate in 1980s New York City, with zero skills beyond having the...
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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
7648 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
3894 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
3886 likes
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Polls

September 2017 Revisit the Shelf Poll

 
  46 votes, 14.0%

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, 329 pages, 1856
 
  45 votes, 13.7%

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, 393 pages, 1938
 
  38 votes, 11.6%

 
  27 votes, 8.2%

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, 1037 pages, 1936
 
  23 votes, 7.0%

The Odyssey by Homer, 541 pages, -800
 
  23 votes, 7.0%

 
  20 votes, 6.1%

 
  20 votes, 6.1%

Middlemarch by George Eliot, 904 pages, 1871
 
  16 votes, 4.9%

Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier, 320 pages, 1925
 
  16 votes, 4.9%

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, 945 pages, 1985
 
  15 votes, 4.6%

Heidi by Johanna Spyri, 352 pages, 1880
 
  14 votes, 4.3%

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, 672 pages, 1859
 
  14 votes, 4.3%

 
  12 votes, 3.6%

329 total votes
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