“Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head. they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely, but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-poering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!”

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About Milan Kundera

Czech and French novelist

Milan Kundera was a Czech and French novelist. He is known for his fiction and for a career shaped by exile, first in France and later through French citizenship. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975 and became a French citizen in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, and he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.

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Books by Milan Kundera

Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí

1997

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Kniha smíchu a zapomnění

1987

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Valčík na rozloučenou

1976

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L'Ignorance

2003

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La lenteur

2006

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