Forgetting freedom and becoming children again, our drama according to Kundera

Milan Kundera left for Paris (where he emigrated in 1975) at the age of 94. But his voice had long since faded away. He had always been a very private man. In an interview with Philip Roth, he had confessed: “When I was a kid, I dreamed of a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I got older, I started writing, and I wanted to be successful. Now that I am known I would like to have an ointment that makes me invisible”. He was a great writer, one of the greatest of the second half of the twentieth century. Novels such as The joke (1967), Life is elsewhere (1973) and The unbearable lightness of being (1984), and the stories of The book of laughter and oblivion (1978), all published in Italian by Adelphi, although having profoundly changed the historical context in which they were born, they remain current for the beauty of the writing, the construction of the characters and the depth of the philosophical reflections. Everyone has to deal with the death of culture in our age. Kundera stands in the great tradition of the central European novel. His constant references have been Kafka, Musil, Broch, Gombrowicz: “novelists who are wonderfully distrustful of the illusion of progress, distrustful of the kitsch of hope. Their pain for the decline of the West, not a sentimental pain. It’s an ironic pain.”