Tribute | Milan Kundera’s works continue to suggest antidotes to abuse of power

Just as it was becoming fashionable to ask, ‘Is Milan Kundera relevant anymore?’, the writer, who passed away aged 94 last week, entered our consciousness again. “No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled,” Kundera wrote in The Joke, his first novel. He explained his technique to The Paris Review thus: “The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas and their awful insignificance.” The Unbearable Lightness of Being was a cult book in the 1980s when I was growing up, the eroticism of a philosophical and political work sharpening the existential edges of Kundera’s essential humanity. As Kundera says, “a life which disappears once and for all is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance… “We need take no more note of it than of a war between two African kingdoms in the 14th century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment…” Both the “heavy” characters and the “light” in the book meet unhappy ends. Noticing how often the idea of lightness occurs in his novels, Kundera wrote, “Perhaps all novelists ever do is write a kind of theme and variations.” The throwaway line about the blacks in Africa, and the objectification of women, here and elsewhere, might account for his fading from popular opinion.