Life Is Elsewhere

<p><strong>I will say no more about this lacerating book except to urge it upon all who care about literature in our difficult era. -- <em>Boston Globe</em></strong></p><p><strong>A sly and merciless lampoon of revolutionary romanticism. . . Kundera commits some of the funniest literary savaging since Evelyn Waugh polished off Dickens in <em>A Handful of Dust</em>.-- Time</strong></p><p>Milan Kundera initially intended to call this novel <em>The Lyrical Age</em>. The lyrical age according to him 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. </p><p>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. Rimbaud entrapped by the communist revolution entrapped in a somber farce.</p>