Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being author, dies at 94
Milan Kundera, the Czech-French author best known for his works The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Joke, died in Paris on Tuesday. He was 94.
A spokeswoman for Kundera's French publisher Gallimard says he died "after a prolonged illness," reports The New York Times.
The prolific writer, who was expelled from the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and later exiled to France, published 10 novels — as well as several short stories, essays, and poetry collections — throughout his nearly 70-year career.
His works, including 1967's The Joke and 1980's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, often explored life and culture within Communist Czechoslovakia through a sultry, philosophical, and political lens. As a result, his books were banned and his Czech citizenship was later revoked in 1979, only to be reinstated 40 years later in 2019.
Kundera is best known for his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which centers around a group of individuals whose lives are forever changed during 1968's Prague Spring. The work was later adapted into a Academy Award–nominated 1988 film of the same name starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, and Lena Olin.
EW's Joe Neumaier called the movie "one of the most successful examples" of a faithful book adaptation. He added, "Putting Kundera's mix of hope and cynicism into the mouths of these self-deluding characters put the story's tone in its proper context, while the realization of the author's cafe romanticism — the evocative music, the sex play — makes the Soviet crackdown, when it comes, an emotional as well as a physical blow."
Kundera published his final novel, The Festival of Insignificance, in 2015.
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