Overview
"I will say no more about this lacerating book except to urge it upon all who care about literature in our difficult era." -- Boston Globe"A sly and merciless lampoon of revolutionary romanticism. . . Kundera commits some of the funniest literary savaging since Evelyn Waugh polished off Dickens in A Handful of Dust."-- TimeMilan Kundera initially intended to call this 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. 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.
- | Author: Milan Kundera
- | Publisher: Harper Perennial
- | Publication Date: Jul 25, 2000
- | Number of Pages: 432 pages
- | Binding: Paperback or Softback
- | ISBN-10: 0060997028
- | ISBN-13: 9780060997021
