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Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera


Born
in Brno, Czechoslovakia
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 His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.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: 4.02 · 790,513 ratings · 48,689 reviews ·181 distinct works •Similar authors
The Unbearable Lightness of...
4.11 avg rating — 478,756 ratings — published 1984 — 474 editions
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The Book of Laughter and Fo...
3.96 avg rating — 50,067 ratings — published 1979 — 214 editions
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Immortality
4.14 avg rating — 39,214 ratings — published 1990 — 215 editions
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The Joke
4.03 avg rating — 36,367 ratings — published 1967 — 244 editions
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Laughable Loves
3.83 avg rating — 33,921 ratings — published 1970 — 211 editions
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Identity
3.69 avg rating — 29,052 ratings — published 1997 — 167 editions
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Ignorance
3.81 avg rating — 24,684 ratings — published 2000
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Life is Elsewhere
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3.96 avg rating — 19,634 ratings — published 1973 — 156 editions
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Slowness
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3.62 avg rating — 20,222 ratings — published 1995 — 169 editions
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Farewell Waltz
3.87 avg rating — 17,653 ratings — published 1972 — 42 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
tags: love
7630 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
tags: love
3879 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
3796 likes
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Polls

April 2021 Revisit the Shelf Poll

Jane EyrebyCharlotte Brontë532 pages, pub. 1847 last read July 2016
67 votes, 24.7%

The Unbearable Lightness of BeingbyMilan Kundera320 pages, pub. 1984, last read Dec. 2012
61 votes, 22.5%

The IdiotbyFyodor Dostoyevsky667 pages, pub. 1869, last read April 2016
46 votes, 17.0%

A Tree Grows in BrooklynbyBetty Smith496 pages, pub. 1943, last read Aug 2019
35 votes, 12.9%

IvanhoebyWalter Scott496 pages, pub. 1819, last read Jan 2017
26 votes, 9.6%

Don QuixotebyMiguel de Cervantes Saavedra1026 pages, pub. 1615, last read Sept. 2015
18 votes, 6.6%

DespairbyVladimir Nabokov212 pages, pub. 1934, last read Sept. 2013
18 votes, 6.6%

271 total votes
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