Life Is Elsewhere

Life Is Elsewhere

by Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher
Life Is Elsewhere

Life Is Elsewhere

by Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher

Paperback(Reprint)

$17.99 
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Overview

"I will say no more about this lacerating book except to urge it upon all who care about literature in our difficult era." — Boston Globe

"A sly and merciless lampoon of revolutionary romanticism. . . Kundera commits some of the funniest literary savaging since Evelyn Waugh polished off Dickens in A Handful of Dust."— Time

Milan Kundera initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to him, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry.

Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent ("innocence with its bloody smile"!), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He's no creep, he's Rimbaud. Rimbaud entrapped by the communist revolution, entrapped in a somber farce.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780060997021
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 07/25/2000
Series: Harper Perennial
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 432
Sales rank: 680,297
Product dimensions: 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.08(d)

About the Author

About The Author
The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929 - 2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves—all originally in Czech. His later novels, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance, and The Festival of Insignificance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.

Hometown:

Paris, France

Date of Birth:

April 1, 1929

Date of Death:

July 11, 2023

Place of Birth:

Brno, Czechoslovakia

Place of Death:

Paris, France

Education:

Undergraduate degree in philosophy, Charles University, Prague, 1952

Read an Excerpt

When the poet's mother wondered where the poet had been conceived, there were only three possibilities to consider: a park bench one night, the apartment of a friend of the poet's father one afternoon, a romantic spot outside Prague late one morning.

When the poet's father asked himself the same question, he concluded that the poet had been conceived in his friend's apartment, for on that day everything had gone wrong. The poet's mother had refused to go to the friend's place, they had quarreled about it twice and reconciled twice, and while they were making love the door lock of the adjoining apartment rasped, the poet's mother took fright, they broke off, and then they resumed lovemaking and finished in a state of mutual tension to which his father attributed the poet's conception.

The poet's mother, on the other hand, never admitted that the poet had been conceived in a borrowed apartment (she was repelled by the bachelor's untidiness, by rumpled sheets and pajamas on a stranger's bed), and she also rejected the possibility that he had been conceived on a park bench, where she had let herself be persuaded to make love, reluctantly and without pleasure, thinking with disgust of the prostitutes who made love this way on such benches. So she became absolutely convinced that the poet had been conceived on a sunny summer morning in the shelter of a huge boulder that stood with sublime pathos among the other boulders in a small valley where the people of Prague liked to stroll on Sundays.

For several reasons this setting is an appropriate place for the poet's conception: in the late morning sun it is a setting of light rather than darkness, day rather thannight; it is in the middle of open nature, thus a place from which to take wing; and finally, though not very far from the apartment buildings on the city's outskirts, it is a romantic landscape strewn with boulders looming out of wildly rough terrain. For the poet's mother all this seemed to express what she was experiencing at the time. Wasn't her great love for the poet's father a romantic rebellion against the dullness and regularity of her parents' life? Wasn't there a hidden likeness between the untamed landscape and the boldness she, the daughter of a rich merchant, showed in choosing a penniless engineer who had just finished his studies?

And so the poet's mother was living a great love, despite the disappointment that followed a few weeks after the beautiful morning at the foot of the boulder. When she disclosed to her lover, with joyous excitement, that the intimate indisposition that monthly disturbed her life was several days overdue, the engineer asserted with appalling indifference (but, it seems to me, a feigned and ill-at-ease indifference) that it was an insignificant disruption of her cycle, which would soon resume its benign rhythm. The poet's mother, perceiving that her lover refused to share her joyous hopes, was hurt, and she stopped talking to him until the day the doctor confirmed her pregnancy. The poet's father said that he knew a gynecologist who would discreetly relieve her of her worries, and she burst into tears.

The poignant end of rebellions! First she rebelled against her parents for the sake of the young engineer, and then she ran to her parents for help against him. Her parents didn't let her down: they spoke plainly to the engineer, who clearly understood that there was no way out, agreed to an ostentatious wedding, and readily accepted a sizable dowry that would enable him to establish his own construction business; then he packed his belongings into a couple of suitcases and moved into the villa his new wife had lived in with her parents from the day she was born.

The engineer's prompt capitulation, however, couldn't hide from the poet's mother that the adventure she had precipitated herself into with a heedlessness she found sublime was not the great shared love she believed she had a full right to. Her father was the owner of two flourishing shops in Prague, and the daughter's morality was that of balanced accounts; since she had invested everything in love (she had been ready to betray her own parents and their peaceful home), she wanted her partner to invest an equal amount of feeling in their joint account. Striving to redress the injustice, she wanted to withdraw from the joint account the affection she had deposited there, and after the wedding she presented a haughty and severe face to her husband.

The poet's mother's sister had recently left the family villa (she had married and rented an apartment in the center of Prague) and so the old retail merchant and his wife lived on the ground floor and the engineer and their daughter above them in the three rooms — two large and one smaller — furnished exactly the way they were twenty years before when the villa was built. Acquiring an entirely furnished home was a rather good deal for the engineer, because he really owned nothing but the contents of the aforementioned two suitcases; nonetheless, he suggested some small changes in the appearance of the rooms. But the poet's mother didn't allow the man who had wanted to put her under the knife of a gynecologist to dare disrupt the time — honored arrangement of rooms that harbored the spirit of her parents, twenty years of sweet routine, and mutual intimacy and safety.

This time, too, the young engineer capitulated without a struggle, permitting himself only a moderate protest, which I note: in the couple's bedroom there was a small tabletop of heavy gray marble on which stood a statuette of a naked man; in his left hand the man was holding a lyre against his plump hip; his right arm was bent in a pathetic gesture as if the fingers had just struck the strings; the right leg was extended forward, the head slightly inclined, and the eyes turned toward the sky. Let me add that the man had an extremely beautiful face, that he had curly hair, and that the whiteness of the alabaster from which the statuette had been sculpted gave the figure something tenderly feminine or divinely virginal; it's not, moreover, by chance that I use the word “divinely”: according to the inscription carved on the pedestal, the man with the lyre was the Greek god Apollo...

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