Milan Kundera Gone at 94

 

Sad news today of the passing of Milan Kundera at 94 years of age.  

When I hear his name I am immediately transported back to my mid-twenties, newly graduated from college and traveling the globe in a quest to shed my prosaic Midwestern life.  His break out novel in the West “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” was my manual in opening up these new possibilities.  I read it on park benches and train stations in Eastern Europe for maximum effect.  His writing was chock-full of history, politics, philosophy, art, and music that drew me like a moth to a flame.

He was a writer and intellectual from the Czech side of Czechoslovakia and had lived through the Communist takeover of his country before relocating to France to pursue his passion without government interference.  The melancholy of such an experience pervaded his novels and was like pure oxygen to me.  The sadness of top-down attempts to suppress the insuppressible, of struggling to be human in an inhumane system, of being exiled from your home and alienated from your culture.  In his stories I could feel so much longing and in that longing I could find hope for something better or at least different.

In retrospect, reading his novels were likely my first impetus to be a writer although those dreams had to be put on hold indefinitely when I began medical school which swallowed me up body and soul.  During that time I met my future wife who was an English major at Butler University.  As it turned out her academic advisor specialized in Kundera and I was able to talk to him about my experience with reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  I told him how the first time I read it I was sympathetic with the main character (Tomas) and liked him a lot but on the second reading a few years later I abhorred him.  He understood why that could very well be the case and I wished we could have talked more but we were not at his office hours for me!

His other great book in my estimation is “Immortality”.  Maybe he is now experiencing a bit of that not only in literary terms but also in spiritual terms, one can hope.  I am thankful for his attempts to reach out and connect with people like me who are hungry for love, for understanding, and what might account for sympathy in the unbearable lightness of being.

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