A reread. Life is Elsewhere - kind of a critique of 19th and 20th century lyricism, which includes both romanticism and surrealism. One of the points Kundera is making in this book is that communism falls into the same camp, which is an interesting observation. Why is it there? With lyricism, it shares the simplistic black and white analysis of people and society. It shares the idealization of the "struggle". It shares a belief in "elsewhere", in the future, in some idealized version of reality which we must move towards.
Interesting that he should make this point in the 70's - I believe John Gray makes similar observations in some his books I've read recently. Gray makes the point of locating both capitalism and communism within the post-Christian cultural history of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.
As usual, he shows his deep, critical understanding of the writers and cultural movements of Europe and the West
I suspect Kundera feels more affinity with the Enlightenment period, the period of Montaigne. I will have to reread some of his later work to check this out.
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