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Kundera, Milan 1929?–

Kundera is a Czech novelist and short story writer whose work has been banned since 1967 in his own country, where he now lives without the right to teach or to travel abroad.

["Life Is Elsewhere"] concerns the efforts of a young poet, Jaromil, to discover his own identity and his role in the turbulent events of the 1948 communist seizure of power. The work, being built entirely around this egoistic, arrogant, yet strangely appealing youth—he is the only character in the book with a name—traces the hero's efforts to escape from his middle-class background, and especially his mother's influence, his attempts to develop first in the field of painting and then of lyrical poetry, and his humorous yet sad love affairs. This last element, so familiar to us from Kundera's previous works, assumes a new dimension: an innocent joke, a mere white lie leads directly to the heroine's arrest and imprisonment and the final disintegration...

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1. Kundera, Milan 1929?–
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1. Milan Kundera