A life of laughter and not forgetting

TRIBUTE

Milan Kundera, the Czech-born writer, who died at the impossible age of 94 in his adopted city of Paris the other day, is perhaps the greatest writer to have left us in recent times, with the arguable exception of John le Carre, the American writer known for his spy thrillers and P J O’Rourke, my favourite satirist.

Kundera wrote most of his works in French once he migrated to France after being banished from his own Czechoslovakia by the then Communist regime that couldn’t stomach, unsurprisingly, his lifelong support for man’s struggle against authority. As he himself says in one of his works (Life Is Elsewhere) ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’. Forgetting, he believed, was the biggest punishment humanity could inflict upon itself. He was always cautioning people who forget their past thus giving enough space for the dictators to make a comeback. In other words, he seemed to urge people to always remember what they just went through at the hands of blind men of authority. 

Kundera came into my world a wee bit before I could actually lay my hands on any of his novels. In fact, he came to me straight through the title of one of his novels (and the best) that fired up the imagination of the world no sooner than it was published in 1984. The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is considered his most celebrated work in an impressive collection of nearly 30 books, mostly novels. 

For the reading population of my generation, it was a tough choice for a long time to pick the favourite writer between Latin America’s icon Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Europe’s conscience-keeper Milan Kundera. That was the time when magic realism (variously called magical realism) was sweeping global literature. Meaty debates have taken place as to whether a certain writer is an adherent to the magic realism style or some other. Not that it matters to either the writer or his book’s sales potential. Marquez would have sold as many copies of his books as they did even without a tag on his writing style as long as people liked his other-worldly stories. The same goes for Kundera and his works. 

However, there is no refuting the individuality and distinction of a writer’s craftsmanship. Craft is as much to a story as the story is to itself. The grandma would be a failed storyteller if she could not start a story and end it in a manner that captivates the child’s attention. Marquez, to me, is the ultimate storyteller who can tell a thousand stories over a thousand nights, and yet, the audience goes on asking for more. Like a pop star at a concert. Marquez is a pop star in the world of literature. 

But Milan Kundera? The Czech-French writer doesn’t fall into any of the frames or silos human imagination can conjure up. He stands out of all formulaic prescriptions. He is a prophet on the loose screaming at an indolent humanity to wake up to the darkness that is creeping up on it: The darkness of dictatorship, the darkness of totalitarianism, of wars and calamities.

But he also tells us romantic and salacious stories of love and lovemaking. His words speak better than how he speaks. As you keep reading him on a page, suddenly in the middle of it all, you are stumped by a sentence like, ‘No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery.’ (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

P P BALA CHANDRAN

The author is a senior print and broadcast journalist.