Life is Elsewhere

<b>Befriend a budding poet and his adoring mother in this seductive early novel - winner of the </b><b>Prix Médicis -</b><b> by the author of </b><i>The Unbearable Lightness of Being</i><b>.</b><br><br><b>'An artist clearly one of the greatest to be found everywhere.' </b>Salman Rushdie<br><br>Milan Kundera initially intended to call this early novel The Lyrical Age. 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. He takes us through the young man's fantasies and love affairs in a characteristic <i>tour de force</i> alive with wit eroticism and ideas.<br><br>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: an artist as a young man.