This novel was published by the French publishers Gallimard in 1973. That same year it won the Prix Médicis étranger. A year later its English edition was released by Adolf A. Knopf in New York. The Czech version came out in Toronto in 1979. Overall, it has been translated into 42 languages, most frequently in French and Spanish. It was also popular with readers in Germany, Italy, and Portugal.
Befriend a budding poet and his adoring mother in this seductive early novel – winner of the Prix Médicis – by the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
‘An artist, clearly one of the greatest to be found everywhere.’ Salman Rushdie
Milan Kundera initially intended to call this early novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to him, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. He takes us through the young man’s fantasies and love affairs in a characteristic tour de force, alive with wit, eroticism and ideas.
Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent (“innocence with its bloody smile”!), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He’s no creep, he’s Rimbaud. Rimbaud entrapped by the communist revolution, entrapped in a somber farce: an artist as a young man.
Source: Faber, 2021 (online)
Revolution and youth are a pair. What can a revolution promise to adults? To some, disgrace; to others, favor. But that favor is not worth much, for it affects only the more miserable half of life and, along with advantages, brings uncertainty, exhausting activity, and disruption. Youth is more fortunate: it is not burdened by guilt, and the revolution can take it entirely under its wing. The uncertainty of revolutionary times is an advantage for youth, for it is the world of the fathers that is being hurled into uncertainty. (…) In the first years after 1948, Communist professors were a minority in Czech higher education. To maintain its grip on the university, the revolution had to give power to the students. Jaromil was a militant in his faculty’s Youth Union, and as such he was an observer at examinations. He then submitted a report to the faculty’s political committee indicating how this or that professor behaved during examinations, the questions he asked, and the opinions he expressed, so that it was actually the examiner rather than the examined who was being subjected to an examination.
Faber & Faber, 2000, p. 138
Prague, poetry and pimples
JAROMIL is a poet ; a poet anxiously pursuing ' manliness ' ; a young man with a fine, childish face, downy yellow hair, and a slightly recording chin, equipped with an ambivalently adoring ' Maman ' (father died in the war). He is routinely egregious and not outstandingly talented. He has the vast, ordinary egocentricity of the adolescent – and then some more. …
' For a novelist, ' Kundera writes in his postscript, ' a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question : What is human existence? ' This may be so ; but i tis hard not to feel (here on the foggier side of the English Channel) that novelists whothink like this will never be those who give the best answers to the question ; or , if there are no answers (' As Heidegger puti t : the essence of man has the form of a question '), they will not be those who elaborate the best versions of the question. …
' A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral, ' Kundera grandly announced in the New York Review of Books in 1984. If so, this novel is immoral. But Kundera is wrong. The best novels alter, seduce, and restore our imaginative attention to what is familiar in people and things. And that, of course, is what he does himself.
It is tempting, given Kundera’s complexity, to tease out from all this a political allegory, but i think his indirections are more direct than that. Kundera is in the business of finding out how we can get at the truth. („Our book is like you,“ as he puts it. „it, too, years to be all the others it could have been.“) He had not yet, in this novel, quite realised what traps he was sitting for himself with his oblique, dancing-on-the-waters approach: but he had sucessfully created the machinery, unique to him, by which an at-arms-lenght lightness of touch could draw the reader down into the depths of his seriousness.
Kundera addresses struggle and death with such a subtle knowledge of humanity that his book ranks alongside similar great texts on the relationship between mother and son, such as Green Henry or Sartre’s The Words. The comic and the horrific, the small and the large, the natural and the grotesque, the real and the dream are blended in Kundera in much the same way as in Kafka’s novels. But the characters here grow differently. Whereas at that time the most horrific vision was of mass evil, the present author has a clear view of it and a stronger doubt about the existence of a higher court to appeal to.
As Milan Kundera often reminds us, only people with a sense of humor can perceive the comic, which the heralds of the new order, or the heralds of a return to the old order, almost never have. And his novels show well how dangerous people without humor are. Even today’s take themselves and their ravings about the all-pervading revolution that is changing the world before our eyes quite seriously. And if their beliefs can't be implemented in a good way, they will want it to go bad. In this, too, Kundera's Jaromil is a cautionary memento.
"Lyricism is drunkenness, and one gets drunk to blend in with the world. Revolution does not desire to be studied and observed, it desires that people merge with it; in that sense, lyricism and lyricism are necessary."
(Life Is Elsewhere)
"The wall behind which people were imprisoned was all papered with verses, and along that wall they danced. Oh no, no danse macabre. Here danced innocence! Innocence with its bloody smile."
(Life Is Elsewhere)
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C’étaient des instants de clairvoyance absolue mais aussi d’émotion absolue; car cette femme l’avait aimé quand il n’était encore rien, elle avait été prête à tout sacrifier pour lui, elle comprenait en aveugle toutes ses pensées, de sorte qu’il pouvait lui parler d’Armstrong ou de Stravinski, de vétilles et de choses graves, elle était pout lui le plus proche de tous les êtres humains… Puis il imagina que ce corps adorable, ce visage adorable éraient morts, et il se dit qu’il ne pourrait pas lui survivre un seul jour. Il savait qu’il était capable de la protéger jusqu’à son dernier souffl, qu’il était capable de donner sa vie pour elle. Mais cette sensation d’amour étouffant n’était qu’une faible lueur éphémère, parce que son esprit était occupé tout entier par l’angoisse et l’effroi. Il était étendu à côté de Kamila, il savait qu’il l’aimait infiniment, mais il était mentalement absent. Il lui caressait le visage, come s’il la caressait d’une distance incommensurable de plusieurs centaines de kilomètres.
Folio Gallimard, 1999, p. 35
