Just heard that Milan Kundera, Czech-French author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and other fantastic books had passed away on Tuesday in Paris. I still remember from the mid 1980’s the deep impression this book left on me, both as a bitter-sweet love story with the Prague Spring and its aftermath as its background, and as a philosophical existentialist reflection on the absurdity of life. I have not reread any of his novels since the 1980’s, but they still stand on my bookshelves and in a lighter (and bearable) future, I will likely get back to them. May the lightness of unbeing be more bearable to him!
“It would be senseless to try to draw its borders exactly. Central Europe is not a state: it is a culture or a fate.”
