Milan Kundera would often repeat to me that life is “a conspiracy of coincidences”. In his case, fate had seen him born on 1 April, and he was convinced that this had had “a profound metaphysical influence” on him. Indeed, one only has to look at his oeuvre: from his first novel, The Joke, to his last, The Festival of Insignificance, all of his books feature the jocular, the lighthearted. Which doesn’t stop them from combining mischievousness with great depth and great lucidity – not to mention melancholy, the renowned Czech lítost!
He must have thought it was a joke, that day I invited him to appear in a TV programme I was presenting, alongside my work at Le Monde. He’d laughed in my face. Television? No way. After the global success of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), he had stopped appearing in public. He used to say that he’d “had an overdose of himself”. In Encounter, a collection of his essays, he describes a ghastly media spectacle in which self-satisfied celebrities laugh very loudly for no reason. Stupidity, vulgarity: Milan couldn’t bear them. Being discreet was his brand of elegance.
