Life Is Elsewhere

Rating:
Summary: Writing Against Poetry (and Socialism, Too)
Review: This is Kundera's most harrowing book because his hero is a monster. He doesn't mean to be a monster, of course. He is Jaromil, a dreamy young man who only wants to write lyric poetry. But this is Czechoslovakia, 1948 and the Communists are about to seize power. And they know how to make use of a well-meaning young naif like Jaromil who will end up writing propaganda and betraying his friends to the secret police. Kundera is ruthlessly funny about the kind of sentimentality that ends up serving totalitarian ends. A French critic wrote that "Life is Elsewhere" is "the strongest work ever written against poetry." I would amend that to say it's the one of the strongest books ever written against *Romanticism*. Kundera is completely unenthralled by Utopia. He's seen too many people sent to the gulag in the name of the perfect society. A thrilling, essential novel.