Milan Kundera: Life Is Elsewhere
 

Milan Kundera’s Life Is Elsewhere follows the life of Jaromil, a mediocre poet growing up between World War II and the Prague Spring. The result of a loveless marriage and an unwanted burden for his father, Jaromil grows up spoiled by his mother, who, having found no love in marriage, devotes her life to Jaromil and sacrifices everything for him.

This novel portrays one of the most intimate relationships between mother and son I’ve ever read. I’ve always enjoyed Kundera’s women; he doesn’t idealise or flatter them; he always writes them with complicated and profound emotional lives. Remaining unnamed throughout most of the novel (only Jaromil is granted a name), she dominates his life and is always in his mind. Jaromil’s attempt at becoming a poet is also an attempt at freeing himself from his mother.

Slowly Jaromil finds this freedom in the rhetoric of the communist revolution. Eagerly joining the Party, he becomes one of its top youngest poets, not because of talent but because he sings the revolution. Having his poems praised since a child when he showed them to his mother (of course), his poems never develop and he grows up without any idea of how bad he is. Since he serves the party, he gets all the adulation he craves.

Since he can’t stand criticism, it’s not surprising the big love of his life is an uneducated salesgirl who thinks he’s a great poet. And in this way he almost manages to ignore pretty much the world around him.

Written in Kundera’s usually distanced and sarcastic voice, this is a novel that has no qualms about mistreating its characters. I’ve never seen Kundera chose sentimentality over irony or give up a chance to show humans at their most absurd. But through this method he always manages to reach at great revelations about the human spirit.

Does this ignorant, naive, uneducated salesgirl have nothing to recommend her besides her inability to suss out that he is a fraud?

I'm just curious if you read the novel, watched the movie, or both, because you started talking about the novel and then you switched to the movie. Is the cinema adapation good according to the novel?

Sorry, Daniel, that was a gaffe http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...es/redface.png I have movies in my head most of the time.

Thank you for addressing my question so fully.

You're imagining adjectives I didn't use. I called the character uneducated, which she is in the context of the people in Jaromil's life. There's nothing more to recommend than the usual about normal people, which is what she is. She's someone Jaromil uses to pretend he's connected with the revolution, but at the same time he's with her because he can't get anyone better, in his view.

But like the people in Jaromil's life, she exists to show what a pathetic, self-centered person the young poet is. Former schoolmates, party members, teachers, all are mystified by him because he's a communist poet; no one realises the shallowness in him.

Even so she goes a few steps further than everyone in exposing him for what he truly is and her fate is as tragic as his, and more realistic in the context of the Prague Spring.

This is one of the best obsevation about Kundera style i have read and i guess why so many dislike him so much.

About him one have to keep in mind that,when under surveillance,he was writting Horoscopes for some of the party big shot for a living.I like this anecdote about Kundera,the sheer irony of life.

Kundera's dettached voice is one of the reasons I love him so much. But I have heard identical complaints to yours from other friends. For me it's one of the most unique voices in prose, similar to Saramago's wandering voice, but less humane and playful.