The Joke
Written by Milan Kundera
Narrated by Richmond Hoxie
4.5/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favour of valuing the book (and all Kundera's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence. This audio edition provides English-language listeners an important further means toward revaluation of The Joke.
For reasons he describes in his author's note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating (with the assistance of his American publisher-editor) a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also in the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel's narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.
Milan Kundera
The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929 - 2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves—all originally in Czech. His later novels, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance, and The Festival of Insignificance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.
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