My first thought when reading The New York Times obituary on the Czech ex-pat novelist Milan Kundera (1929-2023) is that if you live and write for decades, not every reader or critic is going to admire your work. (In the obit, he is described as brilliant, witty, with "his poetically prizefighterish* looks, a misogynist, and a traitor to his country, etc.) Of course, if you have read enough of him, I think his rebuttal to these judgments would be an impolite version of "I don't care what you think, idiot."
That's why I never expected a thank you for including him in The Book Shopper's pantheon of notable writers in the chapter, "What Every Good (Used) Bookstore Should Have." In this chapter I included a rundown of contemporary writers I would use to measure the quality of any secondhand book shop I visited. The list in alphabetical order includes: Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, T.C. Boyle, Bruce Duffy, Ian Frazier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jim Harrison, Oscar Hijuelos, Mary Karr, Maxine Hong Kingston, Milan Kundera, Alice McDermott, and E. Annie Proulx.
In the The Book Shopper (pages 98-101) I gave a rundown of some of his works including a slap-on-the-wrist for recommending an Unbearable Lightness of Being, which after rereading years later I described as "overwrought." The movie version was even worse. As a humorist, I placed Kundera on the funny spectrum next to Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
No wonder he never expressed any appreciation for making my list.
Still, I have a soft spot for him. I read a lot of his books and I still carry two quotes of his forever in my head, which originated with him and that counts. They both come from the book The Art of the Novel and the chapter entitled "Sixty-Three Words":
One the terms is the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" (U.S.S.R.), which he describes as "four words, four lies. " **
The second term is that we live on the Planet of Inexperience.
We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we’ve gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don’t know what it is we’re heading for: the old are innocent children of their own age. In that sense, man’s world is the planet of inexperience.
* The description of "prizefighterish good looks" from a character in Philip Roth's The Human Stain who sees Kundera at a book event.
** Kundera acknowledges that "four words, four lies" originated from the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis.
