Life Is Elsewhere | 
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Product Description
The author intially intended to call this noel, 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 scarosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made hima 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.
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Customer Reviews:
• Spend Your Time Elsewhere. 09 March, 2006
I bought the book after reading the 1st chapter where "the Poet is conceived". Unfortunately, it was downhill from there.
This book tired me out so much with the way it rambled on and on. It seemed far too self righteousness and preachy; it was almost pretentious. It was also difficult to empathize with it's main character who was a pathetic, untalented, mama's boy poet.
Having read and enjoyed a few other Kundera books, I really tried to give this a chance. It was a struggle to finish it. If you don't like ending up hating the protagonist, your time is better spent reading something else.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2NS4ZOVB28DK4
• The "anti-lyrical Thesis" As A Novel Of Ideas. 07 April, 2008
(Note that this review refers to an earlier translation of the novel)
This is a somewhat schematic work and not at all what it might appear to be to the casual reader. Superficially it is a fictional biography of a young man, an aspiring poet who is a contemporary of the author himself. The character is conceived (yes, we get a picture of his conception, or at least his mother's version of it, since he is the center of her existence, and everything about him is not only fascinating to her but must fall into the right place in the well-ordered design of his life which she creates), he is born, he lives a life of ambition and shame, he dies. His name is Jaromil ("lover of spring"). His mother worships him and attempts to organize his life so that he will fulfill what she believes is his promise to become a great artist, even a "great socialist poet". He is both comforted by her presence and unconditional affection and irritated by her smothering attitudes, which enchain him to a perpetual childhood. He formulates strategies of psychological escape into what he imagines maturity must be. The strategies are not flattering (e.g., a period of furious masturbation to compensate for a bout of psychologically-determined impotence with his first girlfriend; verbal and physical mistreatment of his second girlfriend, ending in a betrayal of her and her family to the security police; reporting to the authorities on the unacceptable attitudes of his teachers; constant "elevated" poeticizing of his own miserable existence; and so on).
Through his mother the world bows to Jaromil, but he is uncertain how widespread this homage will be. He is the only character in the book who has a name (excepting his idealized, improved self, a creation of his imagination known, with rather heavy symbolism, as Xavier, a heroic wraith who rescues maidens in distress and then abandons them as he jumps from dream to dream without ever awakening to the soiled reality which surrounds us). The rest of the nameless cast consists of: Maman ("Mommy"); the absent then deceased father; the detested bourgeois aunt and uncle; the janitor's son, later a policeman; the dark-haired Jewish intellectual; the artist, a painter who is Maman's lover and Jaromil's childhood mentor; the admired and envied famous poet; the old poet with gray hair; the middle-aged man (who may be Kundera's fictional alter-ego); and, most important after Maman, the series of girls with whom he has idealized or realized romantic and erotic relations -- the studious girl with spectacles (spiritual kinship, erotic failure), the skinny, unattractive red-headed girl (easy consummation, possessive "love", disappointment, confabulation, betrayal), and the young woman who makes films (erotic, social, and intellectual failure of the most devastating type).
The story takes place in Prague, but there are only a few clues to this, and it might as well have taken elsewhere. The settings are generic - a home that is "nationalized" into an apartment, a university, a park, and of course a large "national security" building, whose employees, policemen, have taken over the confiscated suburban villa of a formerly wealthy bourgeois citizen and converted it into a retreat and recreation center, a place to which Jaromil and his fellow poets are invited to present their work and then engage in a very spurious "dialogue" with the guard dogs of the system. There is more information on the shabbiness of underwear (perhaps intended to limn the shabbiness of official ideals and the behavior of men on the make in the new socialist state "under construction") during the critical time depicted -- say, 1945 to 1950 -- than there is on other indicators of time and place. The nameless characters and the accompanying skeletal props are in fact a stage-setting in which Jaromil acts out a narcissistic play, bedeviled by fears he has that the audience - the rest of the world, people he encounters in school and on the streets - will have an unflattering opinion of him, will see him for what he is, a self-centered, immature youth. Poetry is the weapon he will use to rearrange matters to his satisfaction. And lyrical poetry - its basis in false-heroic notions of the self, its deficiencies with respect to portraying the grim realities of most lives, its ability to becloud the mind while it stirs the soul, and its easy co-optation for propaganda purposes by cynical rulers - is the author's target.
For the book is a thesis of anti-lyricism, a polemical position which is never explicitly stated. We are led to the anti-lyrical position by the pitiful conceits and the dreadful consequences of lyricism as they are seen in Jaromil's unlovely existence (and, for the historical period, in his typical biography). In fact, in Chapter 6, Verse 2, we are given a precise description of the misleading yet attractive and satisfying nature of lyricism, a mini-thesis presentation of the ideas that Jaromil's life embodies. Chapter 6 also illustrates Kundera's long-term fascination with older eighteenth-century predecessors of the "novel of ideas" (rather than the novel of characters or plot, which are perhaps better utilized, in Kundera's mind, as devices to get at the discussion of ideas - or as a way into the examination of changing human situations; this latter consideration shows the lasting influence of French existentialism on Kundera). In this chapter the author breaks into the third-person narrative of Jaromil's life in order to address the reader directly, to pose questions about relative perspectives, and to jump forward beyond his protagonist's death into the relationship of two other characters whose lives have been affected by Jaromil's impostures, before bringing us back to the "death of the poet" in the last chapter. It suggests the possibility of alternative novels that might have been written about other characters in the story - the janitor's son who became a policeman, the red-headed girl - but are now excluded by virtue of the author's having made his choice.
The author's intervention has become, in his words, an "observation tower" which allows him to adjust his focus on the main character (who is, in fact, "the embodiment of lyricism") and also point his telescope into the future and the past. Another set of meditations emerges in this chapter, founded in Jaromil's life but pointing to broader considerations: the poet, especially the Romantic poet, as a "Mama's boy" who reconfigures his life through desperate efforts at escape, both in life and through his art. Kundera uses this characterization to briefly illuminate this aspect of the lives and careers of the 1920s Czech poet Jiri Wolker, and the revered Romantics Shelley, Lermontov, and Rimbaud, would-be bad-boys fleeing the embraces of their mothers and grandmothers, each of whom might be seen as erecting a cult of the defiant self. So Chapter 6 - which, in Kundera's favorite musical terms, is a sort of recapitulation of themes before proceeding to the coda of the last chapter - gives the reader a peculiar gloss on a particular phenomenon in the history of literature.
The translation by Peter Kussi seems acceptable and solid to me, a reader who does not speak Czech. Since the novel is schematic and occasionally thesis-like, there is no need for stylistic heroics or adventures, so I assume the translation reflects a down-to-earth expository prose approach of the original Czech text. Kundera is famously attentive to and fussy about the fine points of translation. I do not know if this particular translation meets his standards. Possibly not, since there was another translation by Aron Asher ten years after this one, and it has the Kundera "seal of approval" in a brief postscript. The Asher translation is a little more "flowing", even lyrical, which is surprising when Kundera's animus against lyricism is taken into account. However, in matters of narrative substance and historical allusions the two translations are interchangeable.
With regard to the contentious subject of "the lyrical age" of men (and mankind), Kundera devoted several passages of his "The Joke" to its consideration, and he has continued to consider it in his several volumes of literary essays. The briefest way to put it is that "the lyrical age" of young men and women is a period of intense adolescent narcissism and intellectual immaturity born of uncertainty about the self. This leads them into "all or nothing" attitudes which invariably have harmful consequences for themselves and others (in the Czech case for the period depicted, "lyricism" resulted in a cheerful alliance between poets and hangmen, as Kundera often reiterates). The biographical background of this long-lasting preoccupation relates, I believe, to what he perceives as the failings and poetic impostures of his own youth, most especially his long poem "The Last May", which depicts in stilted terms the last days of the Communist martyr and cult icon, Julius Fucik. How much of Jaromil is autobiographical in its details, that is, a fictionalized version of "early Kundera" can only be guessed at. Just as he killed off Jaromil as a character by having him choose to die in response to his disappointments (his fatal pneumonia stemming from a weak attempt at suicide) Kundera deliberately killed off his earlier self by ceasing to write poetry and turning to prose and to the novel as an "instrument of rational discourse" (my term for his approach). In the end I would call the book a successful thesis and only a qualified success as a novel (tastes and judgments about this will, I realize, vary greatly among its readers). Whatever my own hesitations on this point, I recommend the book as well worth reading to those interested in Kundera's career, in Czech literature, and in that part of the recent past in central Europe which is now entering its late phase of "living memory", which means that it might soon be forgotten altogether or significantly misrepresented.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1WBHFXKVNXYAO
• Milan Kundera, One Of My Favorite Authors 29 October, 2006
I finally borrowed another of Milan Kundera's books to read from the university library. I didn't enjoy it as much as I did The Unbearable Lightness of Being. However there were still a lot of incisive and thoughtful passages.
What I like most about Milan Kundera is his marvelous skill in capturing the essence of his thoughts in words, and also the thoughts themselves which reveal a kindred soul in deep contemplation of human and life. Whenever I read his books, I feel a longing to write something as deeply revealing as his books.
Life is Elsewhere is about the life of a young poet named Jaromil. The viewpoint is erected at his demise, as the writer tells us. The poet and his mother's relationship are one of the main subjects in this book. The writer says he meant to name the book The Lyric Age but changed the title at the last moment because the publishers worried that no one would buy a book with such an abstract title.
Many critics see this book as a satire of literature, of literary talent, and of life. However, as I read the book, I didn't perceive it as a satire. I felt it to be honest, sometimes brutally so, but still with sympathy and self-pity wrapped around it. Every aspiring artist is bound to go through some of what Jaromil went through.
It especially makes one wonder how literary genius can be defined or if it even can be defined. The writer himself writes in the preface that Jaromil is not a bad poet. I kept that in mind as I read the book. Jaromil is in fact a very sensitive though naive and immature poet. Nobody can be the absolute judge of literary talent.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2Z30HRN2TW4U
• Mediocre 09 October, 2008
The more I read of Milan Kundera the more I am convinced that he is the John Ashbery of prose. Not in the similarities of the former's prose to the latter's poetry, although one could see some similarities, but rather that both men seemed to hit their heights years ago. Kundera with his two masterpieces, The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting in 1978 and The Unbearable Lightness Of Being in 1984, just as Ashbery's lone great book of poems, Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror, was in 1974. That book was preceded by a decade or more of poems with promise, and then followed by three decades of stale rehashes. Just as Ashbery has been coasting I suspect that Kundera has also been in cruise control because what I've read of his, aside from his two classics have left me underwhelmed. Later works, like The Art Of The Novel (1986), Testaments Betrayed (1993), and Identity (1997) are pallid echoes of former glories, while earlier books like Laughable Loves (1969), and Life Is Elsewhere (1973) show flashes of the later brilliance, but also a lot of puerility and preachiness.
LIE, especially, telegraphs much of what will zenith in his later opuses, both in subject matter and execution. The book follows the life story of a poet, replete with all the requisite clichés of pain, suffering, and madness being akin to genius. This is no surprise since the book's title comes from an Arthur Rimbaud poem- Rimbaud being the poet of scatology and infantilism. The poet is named Jaromil, and the only snippets of verse we read from him are hardly anything to qualify him as a great poet. Regardless the book follows the surge to manhood of the very haughty and selfish Jaromil as he slowly asserts his independence from his overbearing mother (cliché alert), who is in a loveless marriage (cliché alert deux) to a man, the poet's father, who never wanted him (cliché alert trois). Of course, the reason these are clichés and not classical structures is because Kundera never lets us see any of the characters having individuated thoughts that are not things we've read a thousand times before in similar characters in similar situations....Although this book is a sort of Mesohippus on the evolutionary scale that would lead to what Kundera would become at his peak I am more concerned about his fall from grace, and the lack of any further imagination that has appeared in Kundera's published works, in the last two decades. Perhaps, this is why young artists- be they the fictive Jaromil, real Rimbaud, or young Kundera- cling so ferociously to their silly myths of tragic art and artists- because they know that the long slow slide to irrelevance awaits most of those who succeed or fail.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3SFO2GSP5CVSM
• A Poet At Odds With Totalitarianism. 27 June, 2008
Who hasn't felt that life is happening elsewhere? Milan Kundera is perhaps best known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Set in World War II Czechoslovakia, where people were imprisoned for their opinions, his 1973 novel, Life Is Elsewhere (Zivot je jinde), is a dark satire that tells the story of Jaromil, a sheltered young man who dreams of writing lyrical poetry in the tradition of Rimbaud, but who is put to the task of writing Communist propoganda instead. Raised by his mother, Jaromil's father was put to death in a gulag. He is capable of betraying even his girlfriend to the Party. It is important to understand that Kundera wrote this novel, which examines the role of the poet in a totalitarian society, after being expelled from the Communist Party (for the second time) in 1970, and before moving to France in 1975, where he has lived in exile ever since. The novel conveys the sense that, in a repressed society, "life is elsewhere." This is quintessential Kundera, full of good, powerful writing.
G. Merritt
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3D9VXSUDX8J36
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