Idiscovered Milan Kundera at the age when his work is most appealing and most dangerous. At seventeen, I could still assume beautiful phrases were true ones and take characters as guides for living. It’s probably not fair to blame The Unbearable Lightness of Being for my disastrous first relationship. But the Czech novelist’s death this past July has me thinking about the male writers whose words have shaped my psyche and whether it’s time to shake them off.
Censored in Czechoslovakia after the Soviets invaded in 1968, Kundera spent most of his career in exile in France. Where his early novels critiqued communist repression, his most famous book, 1984’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, begins with a more universal meditation on choices: we can never know if we’ve made the right ones because we can’t see what would have happened if we had taken a different path. “What can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?” he asks, deflating the shallow optimism of YOLO with a dose of Nietzsche’s eternal return to suggest that events risk being meaningless if they never repeat.
