The exiled Czech-French writer used satire to explore totalitarianism and the human condition.
Milan Kundera was a fierce critic of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and his books were banned there for yearsMilan Kundera, one of the biggest names in European literature in recent decades, has died in Paris aged 94.Anna Mrazova, a spokeswoman for the Milan Kundera Library in his home city of Brno in the Czech Republic, said he had died after a long illness.
Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said his work reached "whole generations of readers across all continents and achieved global fame".Born in 1929 into an elite Czech family, his father was a piano teacher and a student of the composer Janacek, and ensured Kundera received musical training at an advanced level.
In 1970 he was asked to leave the party after expressing support for the Prague Spring movement, the period of political liberalisation crushed by the 1968 Soviet invasion. He soon secured a reputation as a ground-breaking author with The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which told the story of four Czech artists and intellectuals and a dog caught up in the brief period of reform that ended when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague.
"So that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties."His 1979 work The Book of Laughter and Forgetting spanned seven narratives and containing elements of the magic realism genre, while in 1988 he wrote one of his best novels, Immortality. In 2008 he was beset with more political trouble when he was accused of betraying a Czech airman working for US intelligence.
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