In many ways Milan Kundera formed how I think about novels. I first discovered him at about 17, when I read his essay The Art of the Novel followed by his novel Slowness, which had just come out. (A book I ended up stealing from a friend’s apartment, I loved it so much.) He had been dramatically famous in the 1980s, so I associated him with the bookshelves of my parents’ generation, but these two almost miniature books were so funny and lucid and experimental and worldly that they seduced me entirely. This sensation of excitement and the contemporary never left me.
He came, of course, out of a specific historical moment. When he was young in the 1950s he was a member of the Communist party in Prague, but the horror of the Russian invasion of what was then Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the realisation that whatever utopian ideal of society he had envisaged would never be possible, led to his exclusion first from any form of work – banned by the totalitarian Communist authorities, he was eventually forced to live in the woods for a period – and then, ultimately, from his country. In 1975 he left Czechoslovakia for France, where he lived with his wife Vera until his death, becoming a Franco-Czech hybrid: a cross-border phenomenon.
