كازو إيشيجورو
-ولد في عام 1954 في نكازاكي- اليابان، وهو روائي بريطاني من اصل ياباني وانتقلت اسرته الى بريطانيا عام 1960
-درس في بريطانيا وحصل على الجنسية البريطانية عام 1982
-انتقلت العائلة الى بريطانيا ليتمكن والده ن العمل في حقل الفط في بحر الشمال
-درس في مدارس بريطانية وبعد انهاء المدرسة الثانوية سافر الى الولايات المتحدة وكندا لمدة عام
-بدأ دراسته الجامعية عام 1974 وانجزها عام 1978 وحصل على شهادة في اللغة الانجليزية والفلسفة
-غالبا ما ينهي رواياته بنهاية حزينة
-ابطاله يتقبلون ماضيهم وهو ما ينهي المعاناة الذهنية ويجلب الراحة
-غادر اليابان وهو في سن الخامسة ولم يعد اليها الا وهو في الثلاثيين
-احدث رواية له تسمى " عندما كنا ايتام"
-يقول انه كتب عن اليابان لانه كان لديه الكثير من الاسباب الشخصية لفعل ذلك.

يكفي انه من نكزاكي لنقول انه مأزوم لكنه لا بد عانى من كونه ياباني يعيش في انجلترا.
لا نعرف تفاصيل عن طفولته لكننا يمكننا ان ندعي بأنه عاش حياة ازمة كونه ياباني عاش في الغربة.

والان مع سر الروعة في الرواية:

92 ـ أوسكار ولوسيندا، للمؤلف بيتركاري.

Main article: Oscar and Lucinda (film)
A film version released in 1997 was directed by Gillian Armstrong and starred Ralph Fiennes, Cate Blanchett, and Tom Wilkinson.

· Peter Carey discusses Oscar and Lucinda on the BBC World Book Club
· Oscar and Lucinda at the National Film and Sound Archive
· Oscar and Lucinda at IMDB

Oscar Hopkins is a high-strung preacher's kid with hydrophobia and noisy knees. Lucinda Leplastrier is a frizzy-haired heiress who impulsively buys a glass factory with the inheritance forced on her by a well-intentioned adviser. In the early parts of this lushly written book, author Peter Carey renders the seminal turning points in his protagonists' childhoods as exquisite 19th-century set pieces. Young Oscar, denied the heavenly fruit of a Christmas pudding by his cruelly stern father, forever renounces his father's religion in favor of the Anglican Church. "Dear God," Oscar prays, "if it be Thy will that Thy people eat pudding, smite him!" Lucinda's childhood trauma involves a beautiful doll bought by her struggling mother with savings from the jam jar; in a misguided attempt to tame the doll's unruly curls, young Lucinda mutilates her treasure beyond repair. Neither of these coming-of-age stories quite explains how the grownup Oscar and Lucinda each develop a guilty passion for gambling. Oscar plays the horses while at school, and Lucinda, now an orphaned heiress, finds comfort in a game of cards with an odd collection of acquaintances. When the two finally meet, on board a ship bound for New South Wales, they are bound by their affinity for risk, their loneliness, and their awkwardly blossoming (but unexpressed) mutual affection. Their final high-stakes folly--transporting a crystal palace of a church across (literally) godforsaken terrain--strains plausibility, and events turn ghastly as Oscar plays out his bid for Lucinda's heart. Yet even the unconvincing plot turns are made up for by Carey's rich prose and the tale's unpredictable outcome. Although love proves to be the ultimate gamble for Oscar and Lucinda, the story never strays too far from the terrible possibility that even the most thunderstruck lovers can remain isolated in parallel lives.

Peter Philip Carey (born 7 May 1943) is an Australian novelist and short story writer. He is one of only two writers, the other being South African–born J. M. Coetzee, to have won the Booker Prize twice. He won his first in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda, and won for the second time in 2001 with True History of the Kelly Gang.[1] In May 2008 he was also nominated for the "Best of the Booker Prize".
روائي استرالي ولد عام 1943
Carey has won the Miles Franklin Award three times. He is frequently named as Australia's next contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He collaborated on the screenplay of the film Until the End of the World with Wim Wenders. Currently, he is the executive director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.[4]

Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, in 1943. His parents ran a General Motors dealership, Carey Motors. He attended Bacchus Marsh State School from 1948 to 1953, then boarded at Geelong Grammar School between 1954 and 1960 before graduating.
درس في مدرسة داخلية من عام 1954 وحتى عام 1960
In 1961, Carey enrolled in a science degree program at Monash University in Melbourne, majoring in Chemistry and Zoology, but cut short his study due to a car accident and a lack of interest in his studies.
لم يكمل دراسته الجامعية بسبب حادث سيارة وفقدانه الحافز للدراسة
In 1962, he began to work in advertising. He worked at various Melbourne advertising agencies between 1962 and 1967, and worked on campaigns for Volkswagen and Lindeman's Winery, among many others. It was his advertising work that brought him into contact with the writers Barry Oakley and Morris Lurie who introduced him to recent European and American fiction. Carey married his first wife, Leigh Weetman in 1964.
During this time, he read widely, particularly the works of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and William Faulkner, and began writing on his own in 1964. By 1968, he had written a number of unpublished manuscripts including novels entitled Contacts, The Futility Machine and Wog, as well as a short story collection. Several of these manuscripts were accepted by a publisher, but later rejected.
In the late 1960s, he travelled through Europe and parts of the Middle East, ending up in London in 1968, where he worked in advertising once again. Returning to Australia in 1970, he continued to work in advertising in Melbourne and Sydney.
في نهاية عام 1960 سافر الى اوروبا والشرق الاوسط وسافر الى لندن عام 1968 حيث عمل لشركة دعاية اعلان

While working in advertising, Carey wrote and published a number of short stories in magazines and newspapers such as Meanjin and Nation Review. Most of these were published in The Fat Man In History (1974). In 1974, he divorced Weetman and moved to Balmain in Sydney to work for Grey's Advertising Agency.
In 1976, Carey moved to Queensland and joined an 'alternative community' named Starlight in Yandina, north of Brisbane. He would write for three weeks, then spend the fourth week working in Sydney. It was during this time that he wrote most of the stories collected in War Crimes, as well as Bliss, his first published novel. During the 1970s and 1980s, he lived with the painter, Margot Hutcheson.
Carey started his own advertising agency in 1980, the Sydney-based McSpedden Carey Advertising Consultants, in partnership with Bani McSpedden. In 1981, he moved to Bellingen in northern New South Wales. He married theatre director Alison Summers in 1985, and some time around 1990 sold his share of McSpedden Carey and moved to New York, during the writing of The Tax Inspector.

Carey moved to New York in 1990/1991 with his wife and his son to teach creative writing at New York University (NYU). Carey and Alison Summers have since divorced and Carey now lives with the British-born publisher Frances Coady.
In 1998, he provoked controversy by declining an invitation to meet Queen Elizabeth II after winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Jack Maggs, many believing his response to be motivated by his Australian Republican beliefs, though he cited family and personal reasons at the time. Carey later said he had asked for the meeting to be postponed, and indeed the meeting was rescheduled by the Palace. He has been awarded three honorary degrees and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Australian Academy of Humanities and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Peter Carey was born in Australia in 1943
.
He claims his birthplace of Bacchus Marsh had a population of 4,000. This fact should probably be checked.
He was educated at the local state school until the age of eleven and then became a boarder at Geelong Grammar School. He was a student there between 1954 and 1960 — after Rupert Murdoch had graduated and before Prince Charles arrived.
In 1961 he studied science for a single unsuccessful year at Monash University. He was then employed by an advertising agency where he began to receive his literary education, meeting Faulkner, Joyce, Kerouac and other writers he had previously been unaware of. He was nineteen.
For the next thirteen years he wrote fiction at night and weekends, working in many advertising agencies in Melbourne, London and Sydney.
After four novels had been written and rejected The Fat Man in History — a short story collection — was published in 1974. This slim book made him an overnight success.
From 1976 Carey worked one week a month for Grey Advertising, then, in 1981 he established a small business where his generous partner required him to work only two afternoons a week. Thus between 1976 and 1990, he was able to pursue literature obsessively. It was during this period that he wrote War Crimes, Bliss, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda. Illywhacker was short listed for the Booker Prize. Oscar and Lucinda won it. Uncomfortable with this success he began work on The Tax Inspector.
In 1990 he moved to New York where he completed The Tax Inspector. He taught at NYU one night a week. Later he would have similar jobs at Princeton, The New School and Barnard College. During these years he wrote The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Jack Maggs, and True History of the Kelly Gang for which he won his second Booker Prize.
In 2003 he joined Hunter College as the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. In the years since he has written My Life as a Fake, Theft, and His Illegal Self.
He is at work on a new novel.

Peter Carey, The Art of Fiction No. 188
Interviewed by Radhika Jones

When I arrived at Peter Carey’s apartment on a chilly March morning for the first of the two conversations that make up this interview, Carey took my coat and hung it up. When we met again ten days later, he gestured toward the closet and said, “You know where the hangers are.” He is a casual man, usually found in jeans and sneakers, and given to genial profanity. For much of our four hours of conversation he reclined in his chair, his feet up on the kitchen table. But if his posture was laid-back, his expression was lively, and he laughed frequently. When talk turned to his childhood in Australia, he hopped up to show me family photographs—of his grandfather, Robert Graham Carey, an aviator, posing in a monoplane in Adelaide in 1917; and of Carey Motors, the car dealership Carey’s parents ran in Ballarat, near the small town of Bacchus Marsh, where he was born in 1943. From a kitchen drawer Carey produced a fistful of comment slips from his boarding-school days, which he displayed with self-deprecatory glee. “Very hard-working,” wrote his house master at Geelong Grammar School, in 1960. “Very intense and serious-minded. He needs to have his leg pulled and learn to laugh at himself. It may be better to concentrate on the Pure Maths next term.”
Carey has instead concentrated on fiction, with prodigious results. Since 1974 he has published two collections of stories, nine novels, a children’s book, and several short works of nonfiction, and he is one of only two novelists to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice: first for Oscar and Lucinda (1988), the story of two Victorian-era misfits for whom gambling becomes a bond of love; and then for True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)—which sold two million copies worldwide—a novel in the form of a letter from Australia’s outlaw-hero Ned Kelly, horse thief and bank robber, who was hanged at the age of twenty-six. In his recent novels Carey has explored the intersection of creativity and deception. My Life as a Fake (2003) was inspired by a notorious Australian poetry hoax. And in Theft: A Love Story, which was published this May, Carey intertwines the voices of an Australian painter, Michael “Butcher” Boone, and his mentally disabled brother, Hugh, as they navigate an international art world marked by forgery and fraud.
In 1990 Carey moved to New York, where he has lived since. For his last few novels, he has had drafts bound into what he calls “working notebooks.” The first one, made for The Kelly Gang, was “huge, heavy, and annoying to carry through the bush”; the more recent ones use lighter paper with wide margins for notes. The pages are rough (“I type so badly, it’s appalling,” he said), with passages highlighted to indicate where further research is necessary; the margins hold chapter plans and plot points, calendars and timelines, and occasionally pasted-in postcards—anything relevant to the story in progress. Though the notebooks speak to Carey's talent for weaving history and legend into his own richly invented worlds, they also illustrate his editorial rigor. “For a writer,” he says, “the greatest thing is to be able to pare away.”

INTERVIEWER

You were raised in small-town Australia—your parents ran an automobile dealership and sent you to Geelong Grammar, the country’s most prestigious prep school. What did they think when you told them you were a writer?

PETER CAREY

I didn’t tell them. I got a job in advertising. So even though I was writing,
I was always supporting myself. That’s the thing that would matter for my father, who was absolutely a creature of the Great Depression. He would worry every time I got a raise. He’d think, Well, Peter can’t be worth all that money, he’ll be the first to be fired. When I finally began to publish, my father never read my work. He’d say, Oh, that’s your mother’s sort of thing. But my mother found the books rather upsetting. I figure she read just enough to know that she didn’t want to go there. I don’t think my brother read my books, but he may have started recently. My sister was the only one who read me.
None of it had to do with disapproval. My mother and father were very proud of my success. Mind you, by the time I won the Booker Prize my mother’s mind had started to wander a little. I’d gone to London, and I called her and said, Mum, you remember that prize? Oh yes, dear, she said. I said, I’ve won it! Oh, that’s good, dear. There were some people here from your work. I said, What work? I don’t know, she said—they had cameras.
A tabloid television crew had arrived at her doorstep. It was some crappy TV show. They said to her, Mrs. CAREY, you must be really pleased! Oh yes, she said, Peter always was special. They said, Did he ring you? And my mother said, Ring me? Why would he ring me? He never rings me.

INTERVIEWER

They sound like regular parents. How did they come to send you to this fancy boarding school?

CAREY

My father left school at the age of fourteen, so this was a man with no deep experience of formal education. My mother was the daughter of a poor schoolteacher—well, that’s a tautology—a country schoolteacher. I think she might have gone one year to a sort of posh school, but she would have been noticeably not well off. So you have to imagine these two people, my parents, in this little town, working obsessively hard in this small-time car business. The local high school was not particularly distinguished—I think it stopped at a certain level—and my mother was a working mother. Geelong Grammar? Because it was the best. It cost six hundred pounds a year in 1954, which was an unbelievable amount of money—and they really weren’t that well off—and they did it. So I think she thought they were doing the very best thing they could do. I suppose it did solve a few child-care problems. I never felt I was being exiled or sent away, but I was only eleven years old. No one could have guessed that the experience would finally produce an endless string of orphan characters in my books.
يصف دراسته في المدرسة الداخليه بأنها كانت السبب في انه انتج عدد لا نهائي من الروايات التي تتحدث عن الايتام فهو يعتبر ابتعاده عن ذوية في سن الحادية عشره نوع من اليتم الذي سبب له الالم الشديد وكان وراء كتاباته عن الايتام

INTERVIEWER

Is that where they come from—your boarding-school experience?

CAREY

Well, it took me ages to figure that out. I thought the orphans were there because it’s just easier—you don’t have to invent a complicated family history. But I think in retrospect that it’s not a failure of imagination. I’m writing a book now about an orphan. But it’s also the story of Australia, which is a country of orphans.
I have the good fortune that my own personal trauma matches my country’s great historical trauma. Our first fleet was cast out from “home.” Nobody really wanted to be there. Convicts, soldiers were all going to starve or survive together. Later, the state created orphans among the aboriginal population through racial policies, stealing indigenous kids from their communities and trying to breed out their blackness. Then there were all these kids sent from England to Dr. Barnardo’s Homes, which were institutions for homeless and destitute children, some of them run in the most abusive, horrible circumstances. There was one near us in Bacchus Marsh called Northcote Farm. This continued until almost 1970.

INTERVIEWER

Was that experience—of being sent off to school, of being orphaned in that way—what made you think of becoming a writer?

CAREY

Good God, no. I thought I would be an organic chemist. I went off to university, and when I couldn’t understand the chemistry lectures I decided that I would be a zoologist, because zoologists seemed like life-loving people. They looked at art, they read poetry. But I was faking my physics experiments, which is very exhausting. You’d think it’s easy enough to start with the answer and work backwards, but my experimental method was terrible. Then I fell in love and everything went to hell. Then I had a very bad car accident, which I thought was a gift from God—because it was just before final exams. I remember waking up in the wreck, my scalp peeled back, blood pouring down my face, and thinking, Fantastic, I’ve got an excuse to fail.

INTERVIEWER

What happened?

CAREY

The bastards gave me supplementary examinations. So there was no escape. But I failed all of those as well, and then I had to get a job. I finally found a job at an advertising agency. It was a strange agency, as it turns out—full of writers and artists and run by a former member of the Communist Party. It sounds ridiculous, but I worked at three different agencies all run by former Communists. If you think about it, it’s not so strange. It was Australia, not the U.S. It was after the war, and they were young intellectuals of the left. In my first job I worked alongside a man named Barry Oakley, an English teacher in his thirties who had come into advertising to support his wife and six children. He was certainly startled to find himself where he was. But he was writing every day, and he ended up being the literary editor of an Australian newspaper and also a distinguished playwright and novelist. There were also some good painters. None of us were real copywriters. I don’t think I got a single piece of copy accepted all the time I worked there. We used to write copy all day, but then our boss would come down from meetings and put on his cardigan, which was a sign that he was going to be creative, and he would rewrite everything we’d done. So Barry and I were a little hysterical because we couldn’t imagine why we were not being fired.

INTERVIEWER

What did you get out of the experience?

CAREY

I was put into an environment where people were writing and talking about books. Geelong Grammar was known as a “good school,” but this reputation turned out to be more about class than anything else. My education really began at this little advertising agency. I started to read. I read all sorts of things in a great huge rush. James Joyce and Graham Greene and Jack Kerouac and William Faulkner, week after week. No nineteenth-century authors at all. No Australian authors, because I thought they were worthless, of course—that’s good colonial self-hatred. I read haphazardly but with great passion. I would sit there earnestly annotating Pound’s Cantos, for instance, almost building a wall between myself and the possibility of reading them.

INTERVIEWER

How did you make the shift from reading voraciously to thinking that you could do this yourself?

CAREY

If you don’t know anything, you don’t know how difficult it is. I looked at Barry and the others tapping away and thought, If they can do it, I can do it. Also, all of my friends were still at university. They weren’t exactly Marxists, but they did have a good old-style repugnance for trade, advertising in particular. So my choice of employment was subjected to some intensely moral weather. I would go to parties and people would ask what I was doing and I would say, I work in advertising, but I am also writing a novel. There was a redemptive aspect to it. I went to work in 1962, and by ’64 I was writing all the time, every night and every weekend. It didn’t occur to me that, having read nothing and knowing nothing, I was in no position to write a book. I wish I could say I was the last person to suffer from this misunderstanding.

بيتركاري
- روائي استرالي ولد عام 1943
- درس في مدرسة داخلية من عام 1954 وحتى عام 1960
- لم يكمل دراسته الجامعية بسبب حادث سيارة وفقدانه الحافز للدراسة
- في نهاية عام 1960 سافر الى اوروبا والشرق الاوسط وسافر الى لندن عام 1968 حيث عمل لشركة دعاية اعلان
- يصف دراسته في المدرسة الداخليه بأنها كانت السبب في انه انتج عدد لا نهائي من الروايات التي تتحدث عن الايتام فهو يعتبر ابتعاده عن ذوية في سن الحادية عشره نوع من اليتم الذي سبب له الالم الشديد وكان وراء كتاباته عن الايتام
- اصيب اصابة بليغة في حادث سيارة وهو في الجامعة
يرى بأن السبب الوحيد الذي يبرر كتابته لعدد من الروايات التي تدور احداثها حول ايتام انه انتقل وهو في سن الحادية عشرة للعيش في مدرسة داخلية حيث يعتبر ذلك يتم ترك اثره على شخصيته وذهنه.
يتيم اجتماعي بسبب المدرسة الداخلية

93 ـ كتاب الضحكوالنسيان، للمؤلف ميلان كونديرا.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Czech: Kniha smíchu a zapomnění) is a novel by Milan Kundera, published in 1979. It is composed of seven separate narratives united by some common themes. The book considers the nature of forgetting as it occurs in history, politics and life in general. The stories also contain elements found in the genre of Magical Realism.

The first section occurs in 1971 and pertains to the story of Mirek, a former supporter now found to be treasonous, as he explores the depths of his memories pertaining to one woman named Zdena. In his attempt to better his life, knowing that he loved the ugly woman left a blemish, and it was his hope to rectify this through destroying love letters that he had sent her. While he travels to her home and back, he is followed by two men, one of whom is described as "a man in a gray jacket, white shirt and tie, and brown slacks." The men make their intentions obvious, even so far as sharing a laugh with Mirek when he manages to lose their tracking thanks to a sports car. Mirek is arrested at his home after several items are confiscated and then sentenced to jail for six years, his son to two years, and ten or so of his friends to terms of from one to six years.
Kundera also describes a photograph from 21 February 1948, where Vladimír Clementis stands next to Klement Gottwald. When Vladimír Clementis was charged in 1950, he was erased from the photograph (along with the photographer Karel Hájek) by the state propaganda. [1][2] This short example from Czechoslovak history underlines the motif of forgetting in his book.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Novel, 1978
English translation by Michael Henry Heim
Review by JOHN UPDIKE
his book, as it bluntly calls itself, is brilliant and original, written with a purity and wit that invite us directly in; it is also strange, with a strangeness that locks us out. The strangeness of, say, Donald Bartheleme or Barry Hannah derives from shifts in a culture that, even if we do not live in Manhattan or come from Mississippi, is American and therefore instinctively recognizable. These authors ring willful changes and inversions upon forms with which we, too, have become bored, and the lines they startle us with turn out to be hitherto undiscerned lines in our own face.
But the mirror does not so readily give back validation with this playful book, more than a collection of seven stories yet certainly no novel, by an expatriate Czech resident in France, fascinated by sex, and prone to sudden, if graceful, skips into autobiography, abstract rumination, and recent Czech history.
Milan Kundera, he tells us, was as a young man among that moiety of Czechs--"the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half"--who cheered the accession of the Communists to power in February 1948. He was then among the tens of thousands rapidly disillusioned by the harsh oppressions of the new regime: "And suddenly those young, intelligent radicals had the strange feeling of having sent something into the world, a deed of their own making, which had taken on a life of its own, lost all resemblance to the original idea, and totally ignored the originators of the idea. So those young, intelligent radicals started shouting to their deed, calling it back, scolding it, chasing it, hunting it down."
Kundera, the son of a famous pianist, worked--the book jacket tells us--as a laborer and jazz musician under the Communist regime, and "ultimately chose to devote himself to literature and film. In the 60's he was named professor at the Prague Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies, where his students, notably Milos Forman, were the creators of the Czech New Wave in films." When the gallant Czech attempt at "socialism with a human face" under Alexander Dubcek was crushed by the Russian invasion of Aug. 21, 1968, Kundera was erased from his country's official cultural life. By 1975 even his underground existence within his native country had become intolerable and he emigrated to France. In 1979, the Czech Government, responding to the publication in France of "Le livre du rire et de l'oubli," revoked his Czech citizenship.
So Kundera is an Adam driven from Eden again and again--first, from the socialist idyll of his youthful imagining, then from the national attempt to reclaim that idyll in the brief "Prague Spring" of 1968, and then from the Russian-dominated land itself, and lastly from the bare rolls of citizenship. Such a profound and jagged fall makes the life histories of most American writers look as stolid as the progress of a tomato plant, and it is small wonder that Kundera is able to merge personal and political significances with the ease of a Camus.
For instance, the theme of forgetting is masterfully, effortlessly ubiquitous. On the official level, erasure achieves comic effects. The comrade named Clementis who solicitously placed his own cap upon Klement Gottwald's head on the cold day of party annunciation in 1948 was hanged four years later, and airbrushed out of all propaganda photographs, so that "All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald's head." The president the Russians installed after Dubcek, Gustav Husak "is known as the president of forgetting.." Official forgetting is echoed by the personal struggle of the subjects of so revisable a government to recover lost letters, to remember details that give life emotional continuity. The expatriate native of Prague called Tamina, in the central and perhaps best of these disparate though linked chapters, recites to herself all the pet names by which her dead husband ever had called her, and, less and less able to remember his face, resorts to a desperate exercise: ". . .she developed her own special technique of calling him to mind. Whenever she sat across from a man, she would use his head as a kind of sculptor's armature. She would concentrate all her attention on him and remodel his face inside her head, darkening the complexion, adding freckles and warts, scaling down the ears, and coloring the eyes blue. But all her efforts only went to show that her husband's image had disappeared for good."
As another holdout, Mirek, puts it, "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against oblivions." He needs to recover some lost letters for quite another reason than Tamina, who wishes to destroy the letters that he, when a party enthusiast, wrote his mistress of those naÔve days, Zdena. She has remained loyal to their youthful orthodoxy, even to supporting the Russian invasion of 1968. But he quite misses the point of her fidelity to the party--that it is fidelity to him and their old love: "What seemed to be political fanaticism was only an excuse, a parable, a manifesto of fidelity, a coded plaint of unrequited love." Throughout these stories of life under Communism, motives are frequently quite mistaken, and emotions of extreme inappropriateness arise. Every life is lobotomized by the severances of tyranny.
Of course, there is comedy here. "Laughable Loves," coming from a Communist state (published in 1969), seemed perhaps even funnier and sexier than it was, like jokes in a courtroom. We were cheering him on. But the theme of laughter, as developed by Kundera in these later stories, is elaborated to the point where it can no longer be felt as laughter. He is deft and paradoxical but too heavy-hearted to be a funny writer' nor can he bring to his heavy-heartedness that touch of traditional religious resignation which converts depression to the cosmic humor of Kafka, or Bruno Schulz, or the early Malamud, or Gogol. Kundera in comparison is a child of the Enlightenment, and what mysteries exist for him occur on the plane of the psychological and the sexual. There is more analysis of laughter--specified as "a wobbly, breathy sound in the upper reaches of [the] vocal register"--than laughter itself. A certain mechanical liveliness, as of French farce, attends the scenes of group sex: In "Mother," the hero's visiting elderly mother unwittingly blunders back into the living room where her son is about to commence entertaining his wife and another scantily clad woman at once; in "The Border," a zealous orgy hostess vigilantly enforces multiple contacts upon couples threatening to find happiness in a corner by themselves.
Sex is sad for Kundera, at bottom, and laughter is cruel. His book's final image is of a group of doctrinaire, self-congratulatory nudists on the (presumably French) beach, "their naked genitals staring duly, sadly, listlessly at the yellow sand." The proclaimed personal freedoms of the West are no liberation for him. The hero of this final episode, named Jan, has earlier reflected that the Jews had gone to the gas chambers in naked groups, and that "nudity is a shroud." And while still a child, Jan had studied a picture of a naked woman and had "dreamed of a creature with a body offering ten or twenty erotic regions", hence, "when he was still very much a virgin, he knew what it meant to be bored with the female body." The keenest moment of sexual desire, for a male, in this "Book of Laughter and Forgetting" occurs when Kundera's autobiographical hero, without the guise of another name, is closeted with a young woman who has jeopardized her own career as editor by giving him some secret assignments, now discovered. She is composed in manner but keeps going to the bathroom. "And now suddenly the butcher knife of fear had slit her open. She was as open to me as the carcass of a heifer slit down the middle and hanging on a hook. There we were, sitting side by side on a couch in a borrowed apartment, the gurgling of the water filling the empty toilet tank in the background, and suddenly I felt a violent desire to make love to her. Or to be more exact, a violent desire to rape her. To throw myself on her and take possession of her with all her intolerably exciting contradictions, her impeccable outfits, her rebellious insides, her reason and her fear, her pride and her misery."
Against the memory of such surges of violation and exposure, which the pressures of the Communist world make possible, the public nudity of the West of course must seem tame. As to the women of Kundera's world, sex is best when it is soulless. Undergoing the charade of triadic sex, the sensitive, jealous Marketa imagines that her husband is headless: "The minute she severed the head from his body, she felt the new and intoxicated touch of freedom. The anonymity of their bodies was sudden paradise, paradise regained." And Tamina, in the second story called "The Angels," sexually beset by a band of children, because for the first time in her life her body had taken pleasure in the absence of the soul, which imagining nothing and remembering nothing, had quietly left the room." In short, pleasure demands suicide of a sort." "Or to put it another way, sexuality freed from its diabolical ties with love had become a joy of angelic simplicity."
The angels in Milan Kundera's complex universe of disjunction are malevolent. These children end by tormenting Tamina and goading her to the death by drowning she had, earlier, sought in vain. In the first story called "The Angels," they dance in the streets of Prague to celebrate some political murders; they dance in circles until they rise into the sky. The angels are the unfallen from the Communist faith; Kundera once danced in their circle, and remembers their bliss. Angels are the heralds of "uncontested. . .meaning on earth"; once fallen from their circle, one never stops falling, "deeper," Kundera tells us, "away from my country and into the void of a world resounding with the terrifying laughter of the angels that covers my every word with its din."
Kundera's prose presents a surface like that of a shattered mirror, where brightly mirroring fragments lie mixed with pieces of lusterless silvering. The Communists idyll he youthfully believed in seems somehow to exist for him still, though mockingly and excludingly. He never asks himself---the most interesting political question of the century--why a plausible and necessarily redistribution of wealth should, in its Communist form, demand such an exorbitant sacrifice of individual freedom? Why must the idyll turn, not merely less than idyll, but nightmare? Kundera describes the terrors and humiliations of the intellectual under totalitarianism, with crystalline authority, yet for all he tells us these barbarities are rooted in the sky, in whims beyond accounting. He keeps ploughing his earthly material back into the metaphors of laughter and forgetting, of angels and children. Tamina, he states, is the book's "main character and main audience, and all the others are variations on her story and come together in her life as in a mirror." Yet in her final appearance she seems allegorized into nothing, and the episode almost whimsical. As in the case of Nabokov, a private history of fracture and outrage is rendered kaleidoscopic by the twists of a haughty artistic will--without, however, Nabokov's conviction that art, the reality we extract from reality, is sufficiently redeeming.
The position of a writer from the Socialist world in the West cannot but be uncomfortable. He cannot but despise us for our cheap freedoms, our more subtle enslavements; and we it may be, cannot but condescend to his discovery, at such heavy cost to his life, of lessons that Messrs. Churchill and Truman so roundly read to us 35 years ago. Survival tactics vary. Solzhenitsyn in Vermont builds a little iron curtain of his own and continues to thunder as if he were still imprisoned in Russia. Joseph Brodsky, the most aloof and metaphysical of dissidents in his Leningrad years, is becoming, amazingly, an American poet. Kundera--who moved, after all, only a few hundred kilometers west, and who unlike many expatriates had enjoyed considerable artistic success and prestige in his own country--seems, five years out, in a middling position. He is crossing that border he describes, to the side that men dread, "where the language of their tortured nation would sound as meaningless as the twittering of birds." A meaning once omnipresent is gone. A habit of vision developed in one context is being broken in another. The sexual descriptions, both tender and shrewd, that had an effect of subversives comment within the Czech context have a somewhat jaded, hollow ring out of it. In "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" a work of social realism and protest coexists with a brittleness, an angelic mockery that, amid much melancholy remembrance and shrewd psychology, makes us uncomfortable

Milan Kundera, born 1 April 1929, is a writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. Kundera has written in both Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; these therefore are not considered translations but original works. His books were banned by the Communist regimes of Czechoslovakia until the downfall of the regime in the Velvet Revolution of 1989.
روائي من تشيكوسلفاكيا ولد عام 1029 عاش في المنفى منذ عام 1975

Kundera was born in 1929 at Purkyňova ulice, 6 (6 Purkyňova Street) in Brno, Czechoslovakia, to a middle-class family. His father, Ludvík Kundera (1891–1971), once a pupil of the composer Leoš Janáček, was an important Czech musicologist and pianist who served as the head of the Janáček Music Academy in Brno from 1948 to 1961.
مات ابوه عام 1971
Milan learned to play the piano from his father; he later studied musicology and musical composition. Musicological influences and references can be found throughout his work; he has even gone so far as to include musical notation in the text to make a point. Kundera is a cousin of Czech writer and translator Ludvík Kundera. He belonged to the generation of young Czechs who had had little or no experience of the pre-war democratic Czechoslovak Republic. Their ideology was greatly influenced by the experiences of World War II and the German occupation. Still in his teens, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia which seized power in 1948. He completed his secondary school studies in Brno at Gymnázium třída Kapitána Jaroše in 1948. He studied literature and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague. After two terms, he transferred to the Film Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where he first attended lectures in film direction and script writing.
In 1950, his studies were briefly interrupted by political interferences. He and writer Jan Trefulka were expelled from the party for "anti-party activities." Trefulka described the incident in his novella Pršelo jim štěstí (Happiness Rained On Them, 1962). Kundera also used the incident as an inspiration for the main theme of his novel Žert (The Joke, 1967). After Kundera graduated in 1952, the Film Faculty appointed him a lecturer in world literature. In 1956 Milan Kundera was readmitted into the Party. He was expelled for the second time in 1970. Kundera, along with other reform communist writers such as Pavel Kohout, were partly involved in the 1968 Prague Spring. This brief period of reformist activities was crushed by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Kundera remained committed to reforming Czech communism, and argued vehemently in print with fellow Czech writer Václav Havel, saying, essentially, that everyone should remain calm and that "nobody is being locked up for his opinions yet," and "the significance of the Prague Autumn may ultimately be greater than that of the Prague Spring." Finally, however, Kundera relinquished his reformist dreams and moved to France in 1975. He taught for a few years in the University of Rennes.[2][3] He was stripped of Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979; he has been a French citizen since 1981.[4]
He maintains contacts with Czech and Slovak friends in his homeland, but rarely returns and always does so incognito.

Although his early poetic works are staunchly pro-communist, his novels escape ideological classification. Kundera has repeatedly insisted on being considered a novelist, rather than a political or dissident writer. Political commentary has all but disappeared from his novels (starting specifically after The Unbearable Lightness of Being) except in relation to broader philosophical themes. Kundera's style of fiction, interlaced with philosophical digression, greatly inspired by the novels of Robert Musil and the philosophy of Nietzsche,] is also used by authors Alain de Botton and Adam Thirlwell. Kundera takes his inspiration, as he notes often enough, not only from the Renaissance authors Giovanni Boccaccio and Rabelais, but also from Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, Denis Diderot, Robert Musil, Witold Gombrowicz, Hermann Broch, Franz Kafka, Martin Heidegger, and perhaps most importantly, Miguel de Cervantes, to whose legacy he considers himself most committed.
Originally, he wrote in Czech. From 1993 onwards, he has written his novels in French. Between 1985 and 1987 he undertook the revision of the French translations of his earlier works. As a result, all of his books exist in French with the authority of the original. His books have been translated into many languages.

Main article: The Joke (novel)
In his first novel, The Joke (1967), he gave a satirical account of the nature of totalitarianism in the Communist era. Kundera was quick to criticize the Soviet invasion in 1968. This led to his blacklisting in Czechoslavakia and his works being banned there.

Main article: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
In 1975, Kundera moved to France. There he published The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) which told of Czech citizens opposing the communist regime in various ways. An unusual mixture of novel, short story collection and author's musings, the book set the tone for his works in exile. Critics have noted the irony that the country that Kundera seemed to be writing about when he talked about Czechoslovakia in the book, "is, thanks to the latest political redefinitions, no longer precisely there" which is The "kind of disappearance and reappearance" Kundera explores in the book.[8]

Main article: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
In 1984, he published The Unbearable Lightness of Being, his most famous work. The book chronicled the fragile nature of the fate of the individual and theorized that a single lifetime is insignificant in the scope of Nietzsche's concept of eternal return, because in an infinite universe, everything is guaranteed to recur infinitely. In 1988, American director Philip Kaufman released a film version of the novel.

Main article: Immortality (novel)
In 1990, Kundera published Immortality. The novel, his last in Czech, was more cosmopolitan than its predecessors. Its content was more explicitly philosophical, as well as less political. It would set the tone for his later novels.

Kundera's characters are often explicitly identified as figments of his own imagination, commenting in the first-person on the characters in entirely third-person stories. Kundera is more concerned with the words that shape or mould his characters than with the characters' physical appearance. In his non-fiction work, The Art of the Novel, he says that the reader's imagination automatically completes the writer's vision. He, as the writer, wishes to focus on the essential insofar as the physical is not critical to an understanding of the character. For him the essential may not include the physical appearance or even the interior world (the psychological world) of his characters. Other times, a specific feature or trait may become the character's idiosyncratic focus.
François Ricard suggested that Kundera conceives with regard to an overall oeuvre, rather than limiting his ideas to the scope of just one novel at a time. His themes and meta-themes exist across the entire oeuvre. Each new book manifests the latest stage of his personal philosophy. Some of these meta-themes include exile, identity, life beyond the border (beyond love, beyond art, beyond seriousness), history as continual return, and the pleasure of a less "important" life. (François Ricard, 2003) Many of Kundera's characters are intended as expositions of one of these themes at the expense of their fully developed humanity. Specifics in regard to the characters tend to be rather vague. Often, more than one main character is used in a novel, even to the extent of completely discontinuing a character and resuming the plot with a brand new character. As he told Philip Roth in an interview in The Village Voice: "Intimate life [is] understood as one's personal secret, as something valuable, inviolable, the basis of one's originality.[9]
Kundera's early novels explore the dual tragic and comic aspects of totalitarianism. He does not view his works, however, as political commentary. "The condemnation of totalitarianism doesn't deserve a novel," says Kundera. According to the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, "What he finds interesting is the similarity between totalitarianism and "the immemorial and fascinating dream of a harmonious society where private life and public life form but one unity and all are united around one will and one faith..." In exploring the dark humor of this topic, Kundera seems deeply influenced by Franz Kafka.
Kundera considers himself to be a writer without a message. For example, in the Sixty-three Words, a chapter in The Art of the Novel, Kundera recounts an episode when a Scandinavian publisher hesitated about going ahead with the publication of The Farewell Party because of the apparent anti-abortion message contained in the novel. Kundera explains that not only was the publisher wrong about the existence of such a message in the work, but, "...I was delighted with the misunderstanding. I had succeeded as a novelist. I succeeded in maintaining the moral ambiguity of the situation. I had kept faith with the essence of the novel as an art: irony. And irony doesn't give a damn about messages!"[10]
He also digresses into musical matters, analyzing Czech folk music, quoting from Leoš Janáček and Bartók. Further in this vein, he interpolates musical excerpts into the text (for example, in The Joke), or discusses Schoenberg and atonality.