TRIBUTE | Milan Kundera (1929-2023): A writer who mixed philosophy and irony to explore human nature

Kundera won accolades for depicting themes and characters that floated between the mundane reality of everyday life and the lofty world of ideas. Czech-born novelist Milan Kundera, who satirised totalitarian regimes and mixed dark irony with philosophical musings to explore the human condition, has died, a library he worked with said on July 12. Coming at a time when Czech reformers were seeking to establish “socialism with a human face”, the novel was a first step in Kundera’s path from party member to exiled dissident, a moniker he disdained. “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography,” The New York Times wrote in a review. Accepting the Jerusalem Prize in 1985, Kundera said: “It pleases me to think that the art of the novel came into the world as the echo of God’s laughter.” Kundera explained what drove him as a writer and his disdain for self reflection in an interview with The New York Times the same year.