Life is Elsewhere

First UK edition. 8vo. 312pp. Black cloth boards, lettered in silver to spine. Jacket illustration by Andrzej Klimowski. Translated from the Czech by Peter Kussi.

Author's second novel. Winner of the 1973 Prix Médicis Étranger for the French edition published by Éditions Gallimard as La vie est ailleurs. Definitive English-language edition with a postscript by the author, in which he states, "My novel is an epos of youth, and an analysis of what I call 'the lyric attitude'".

Viewing 'lyricism' as an agent of 'totalitarianism,' Kundera's Communist-era comedy features a self-deluded poet named Jaromil, who sacrifices his artistic ambitions to Stalinist cultural norms and becomes a police informer. In an ironic plot twist, in 2008, the Czech weekly Respekt, reported on an investigation carried out by the Czech Institute for Studies of Totalitarian Regimes, which – citing a 1950 police report – named Kundera as an informant over an absconded young Czech pilot, Miroslav Dvořáček, who ended up serving 14 years in a labour camp. Kundera denied any involvement in the denunciation and a panel of internationally recognized writers, including four Nobel laureates, came to his defence.

Although written in 1969, the original Czech edition of Život je jinde wasn't published until 1979, and then by Czech expatriate author Josef Škvorecký's Sixty-Eight Publishers, in Toronto.

Having lost his domestic readership whilst living in exile, Kundera became obsessed with retaining the Czech original's stylistic idiosyncrasies in the recipient language, sometimes at the expense of the newly coined text's fluency. After the commercial success of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), and his move from Knopf to HarperCollins, the author was granted veto power over the choice of translator.

At the same time, he himself revised the French versions of his books to facilitate readier access from a major European language for publishers worldwide, to the extent that the French translations have now become 'originating texts' for the more recent Czech editions. This constant rewriting of manuscripts in pursuit of 'textual integrity' has served to alienate a host of editors and translators over the years, inviting criticism over 'quixotic' and 'irrelevant textual changes'.

"A sly and merciless lampoon of revolutionary romanticism... Kundera commits some of the funniest literary savaging since Evelyn Waugh polished off Dickens in A Handful of Dust." –TIME

[Woods, Michelle. Translating Milan Kundera. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2006]