Milan Kundera, who wrote ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’ dies at 94

Czech author Milan Kundera is best known for his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being. After the Soviet occupation, Kundera was blacklisted and banned. He lived in exile in France, where he would later become a citizen. He’s pictured above in 1973.

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The Czech writer Milan Kundera was interested in big topics — sex, surveillance, death, totalitarianism. But his books always approached them with a sense of humor, a certain lightness. Kundera has died in Paris at the age of 94, the Milan Kundera Library said Wednesday.

Kundera’s most popular book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, follows a tangle of lovers before and after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It starts off ruminating on philosophy, but it has a conversational tone.

Kundera played with dichotomies — simple images against high-minded philosophy — presenting totalitarianism as both momentous and everyday. Sex being both deeply serious and kind of gross and funny.

“He’s interested in what he calls the thinking novel,” says Michelle Woods, who teaches literature at SUNY New Paltz. Woods wrote a book about the many translations of Kundera’s work and she says Kundera thought readers should come to novels looking for more than just plot – they should leave with “more questions than answers.”

Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1929. His first book, The Joke, was a satirical take on totalitarian communism. The Czech government held up its publication, insisted that Kundera change a few things, but he refused. It was eventually published in 1967 to wide acclaim.

A year later, Czechoslovakia, which was in the…