| This morning, Americans awoke to learn that Milan Kundera, the author of novels including “The Joke” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” had died in Paris, his adopted home town, at the age of ninety-four. The writer, whose fiction often combined an unlikely mix of comedy and philosophy, had reached the West—and then Western literary acclaim—after leaving his native Czechoslovakia, where he had repeatedly run afoul of the ruling Communist Party. Kundera centered his most famous book, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” on four characters in his native country, including a former surgeon whose defiance of the Party had forced him into a new profession, as a window washer. Shortly before the book’s American release, in 1984, The New Yorker published a lengthy excerpt, bestowing on most readers their first taste of Kundera in English. The piece encapsulates the novel’s distinctive commingling of Cold War perversity, existential musing, and sexual entanglement. “A life that disappears once and for all, that does not return, is then like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance,” Kundera writes in the opening lines. The description may apply to some lives, but—given the author’s vitality and literary impact—certainly not to his. | 
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