Life is Elsewhere - Softcover

Kundera, Milan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060997028 ISBN 13: 9780060997021

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2000

Synopsis

The author initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, 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.

About this title

Review:

"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

"Tender and unsparing..."Life Is Elsewhere is a remarkable portrait of an artist as a young man."--"Newsweek"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."--"Time

Book Description:

Life is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera is an intriguing early novel from the hugely acclaimed Czech novelist and author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0060997028
• ISBN 13: 9780060997021
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432