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Immortality
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Release date: 12-06-12
- Language: English
- Publisher: Faber & Faber
Regular price: $17.45
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The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 123
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4 out of 5 stars
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A well-lubricated orgy of ideas
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The Joke
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- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 57
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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 favor 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.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Adder Sowing Thorns in the Garden of the Soul
- By W Perry Hall on 02-28-17
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Life Is Elsewhere
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher (Translator)
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 12
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 10
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Story4 out of 5 stars 10
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.
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Laughable Loves
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 7 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 20
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 16
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 16
Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road - only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone home to his wife.
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Farewell Waltz
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 16
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 15
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In this dark farce of a novel, set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American (at once saint and Don Juan); a popular trumpeter and his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife; an disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward. Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Morality and Mortality
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 965
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 864
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A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 123
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- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 57
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Adder Sowing Thorns in the Garden of the Soul
- By W Perry Hall on 02-28-17
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Life Is Elsewhere
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher (Translator)
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 12
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 10
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 10
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 20
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 16
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 16
Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road - only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone home to his wife.
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Farewell Waltz
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- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 16
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 15
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 16
In this dark farce of a novel, set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American (at once saint and Don Juan); a popular trumpeter and his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife; an disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward. Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Morality and Mortality
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Slowness
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 19
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 18
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Story4 out of 5 stars 18
Disconcerted and enchanted, the listener follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than 200 years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show .
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The Festival of Insignificance
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- Length: 2 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 27
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 28
Listeners who know Milan Kundera's earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the "unserious" in a novel is not at all unexpected of him.
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3 out of 5 stars
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A Review of Little Significance.
- By Darwin8u on 07-14-15
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Identity
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 21
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 16
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 17
There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognize the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is erased while we simultaneously doubt our own. This also happens with couples - indeed, above all with couples, because lovers fear more than anything else "losing sight" of the loved one. With stunning artfulness in expanding and playing variations on the meaningful moment, Milan Kundera has made this situation - and the vague sense of panic it inspires - the very fabric of this novel.
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Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the postpsychological novel.
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Ignorance
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 18
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Irena and Josef meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence "their memories no longer match."
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Love in the Time of Cholera
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From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes a masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds two people's lives together for more than half a century. In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career, he whiles away the years in 622 affairs - yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral....
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Timeless Romance, brought to life by Armando Duràn
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Men Without Women
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Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all. Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his entire body of work, in this collection Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Murakami Being Murakami
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The Curtain
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 11
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 10
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 10
In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the art of the novel, renowned author Milan Kundera suggests that "the curtain" represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has - a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides. Here an incomparable literary artist cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Opinionated and interesting
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Buddenbrooks
- The Decline of a Family
- By: Thomas Mann
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- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 198
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 184
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 183
First published in 1900, when Thomas Mann was 25, Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family - a work so true to life that it scandalized the author’s former neighbours in his native Lübeck.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Where Have You Been All My Life, Thomas Mann?
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The Trial
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 386
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 261
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Story4 out of 5 stars 262
If Max Brod had obeyed Franz Kafka's dying request, Kafka's unpublished manuscripts would have been burned, unread. Fortunately, Brod ignored his friend's wishes and published The Trial, which became the author's most famous work. Now Kafka's enigmatic novel regains its humor and stylistic elegance in a new translation based on the restored original manuscript.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent New Translation of a Classic Novel
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Madame Bovary
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 374
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 339
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Story4 out of 5 stars 336
In Madame Bovary, one of the great novels of 19th-century France, Flaubert draws a deeply felt and sympathetic portrait of a woman who, having married a country doctor and found herself unhappy with a rural, genteel existence, longs for love and excitement. However, her aspirations and her desires to escape only bring her further disappointment and eventually lead to unexpected, painful consequences. Flaubert’s critical portrait of bourgeois provincial life remains as powerful as ever
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5 out of 5 stars
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It's such a 19th century classic.
- By inbar on 03-28-16
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Kafka on the Shore
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- Narrated by: Sean Barrett, Oliver Le Sueur
- Length: 19 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,948
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,773
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,767
With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Love it!
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Publisher's Summary
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera.
Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.
Critic Reviews
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Overall
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4 out of 5 stars
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4 out of 5 stars
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- Lafi
- 04-10-15
Amazing and unique.
Loved it. Didn't want it to end. interesting, deep, touching. Each character resembles a part of our personalities.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Viktória
- 12-10-16
Breathtakingly beautiful
Wonderful story, unique, relatable characters. I enjoyed it a lot. Love it and recommend it!
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Czarniecka
- 04-04-18
good but not my favourite by Kundera
I enjoyed the story and the performance but was somehow overwhelmed by the philosophical content of the novel. It's well crafted, funny at times, it has all the beauty and the depth of Kundera's style but it's not my favourite novel by him (which remains for the moment The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
1 of 1 people found this review helpful