lindsacl needs a nudge to read Milan Kundera in December

Milan Kundera is an author I haven't read, and I'd like to do so soon as part of my "Reading Globally" journey. But where to start?

The two books owned by the most LT members are The Unbearable Lightness of Being with 6633 copies, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with 2399 copies. And of course there are many others ...

Which of his books would you nudge me towards? And why? Thanks!

The Unbearable Lightness of Being was my first Kundera book and I really loved it. I read it right after Julian Barnes Flaubert's Parrot, and thought they were both innovative in style and structure and very charming.

Unfortunately it was over 20 years ago that I read it, so the specifics are not with me. Both are excellent reads but I would start with TULOB. You won't regret it.

The first book by Kundera I read, a very long time ago, was The Joke, which I liked so much that I eventually read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, just as good. So, in my opinion, you cannot go wrong with either one.

Kundera bears reading and rereading and while I would read Book of Laughter first, you cannot go wrong either way, or even beginning with The Joke. I have recently been digesting The Curtain which has filled me with admiration for his critical thinking. From Publishers Weekly: It's not often that a work comes along that so perfectly distills an approach to art that it realigns the way an art form is understood. Susan Sontag's revolutionary work On Photography was one such piece. Kundera's new book-length essay should be another. The renowned Franco-Czech author (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) investigates the history of the novel, beginning with the moment in which Cervantes denied Don Quixote's desire for elevation to knight-errant and instead "cast a legendary figure down: into the world of prose." In the prosaic world, according to Kundera, the absence of pathos, the insistence on the comedic and the interrelation of all novels represent the locus of meaning and emotional impact. Kundera argues against the tendency to classify and study literature through the lens of nationality. Instead, he proposes a world literature that would take into account the way novelists learn from one another, Sterne from Rabelais, Fielding from Cervantes, Joyce from Flaubert and, though he never explicitly states it, Kundera from them all. This is a self-consciously personal vision of "the poetics of the novel," one that displays Kundera's own preoccupations, from his Central European dislike of sentimental kitsch to his exhortation that, to be counted in the history of the novel, all novelists must follow Cervantes, must "tear the curtain of preinterpretation" into which we are all born. Only then can the novel accomplish its purpose: to show its readers their own lives.

I've only read The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I enjoyed it, but do not feel qualified to nudge here. Thanks for the informative informative summary polutropos. I sense some more Milan Kundera in my future.

Like Mary, I've only read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and although I seem to remember enjoying it, it was such a long time ago I can't remember much about it. Meanwhile I have Immortality amd Life Is Elsewhere knocking about, unread as yet.

I am reading Slowness, but I loved The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

I've read pretty much all of Kundera's books and whilst I remember enjoying them all, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the only one that I can actually remember in detail. It is also one of the few books I've ever re-read and can see myself re-reading again and again.

So without a doubt that would get my vote.

*** NUDGING CLOSED, WITH A CONFESSION ***

I appreciate all your thoughts, and I think I will go with Unbearable Lightness of Being since it was mentioned so many times. However ... I also realized that Kundera is very different from the authors I typically read, and I think it will require a bit of effort. And that's just not what I'm in the mood for in December, what with all the holiday hustle & bustle. So I accept the nudge, but will defer it into 2009.

I'll also create a new thread in December, looking for nudges on some now-dusty TBRs. Thanks!

Ah, closed before I got here. My usual story.

If you want more when done, I'd second The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts suggesting above; it's all about how to think about world literature (and, of course, World Literature), and has a lot of insights from which every Global Reader might benefit.