Milan Kundera has 9 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.7★ across 61 ratings. The most-rated is The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Summary
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals - while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being.” A major achievement from one of the world’s truly great writers, Milan Kundera’s magnificent novel of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.
©1984; 1984 Milan Kundera; English translation © Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Summary
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
©1978 Milan Kundera; translation copyright 1996, Aaron Asher (P)2012 HarperCollinsPublishers
Immortality
Summary
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.
©1990 Milan Kundera (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers
Laughable Loves
Summary
Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road - only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone home to his wife. Games, fantasies, and schemes abound in all the stories, while different characters react in varying ways to the sudden release of erotic impulses.
©1999 Milan Kundera (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers
The Art of the Novel
Summary
Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the postpsychological novel.
©2000 Milan Kundera (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers
The Joke
Summary
All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence. The present audio edition provides English-language listeners an important further means toward revaluation of The Joke. For reasons he describes in his Author's Note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating (with the assistance of his American publisher-editor) a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also to the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel's narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.
©1967 Milan Kundera (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers
Abschiedswalzer
Summary
In einem ruhigen Kurort in Böhmen schläft die Krankenschwester Rosa mit Klima, einem berühmten Trompeter, der jedoch nur seine eifersüchtige Frau Kamila liebt. Dafür wird Rosa wie wahnsinnig von Franta geliebt. Der Gynäkologe Dr. Skreta dagegen liebt nur sich selbst und injiziert seinen kinderlosen Patientinnen deshalb reihenweise sein eigenes Sperma, was aber nichts nützt. Schwanger wird nur Rosa. Immer schneller drehen sich Kunderas Figuren in diesem verzweifelten, sehnsuchtsvollen Tanz. Der Schauspieler Wolfram Berger liest des Autors wohl bösesten und zugleich amüsantesten Roman in voller Länge.
©2018 DAV (P)2018 DAV
Slowness
Summary
Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the listener follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than 200 years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy.
©1995 Milan Kundera (P)2012 HarperColilns Publishers
Das Fest der Bedeutungslosigkeit
Summary
Ein Resümee seines Werkes Vier Männer streifen durch Paris, besuchen ein elegantes Fest, beobachten die erotischen Strategien ihrer Mitmenschen: Alain entwickelt komplizierte Theorien über die Lust junger Mädchen, den Bauchnabel freizulassen. Ramon dagegen würde gern endlich die Chagall-Ausstellung besuchen. Charles erläutert Stalins Witze, bei denen niemals jemand lachte. Und Caliban, der Schauspieler ohne Rollen, erfindet eine eigene Sprache, die er zu Pakistanisch erklärt und über die nur er sich kaputtlachen kann - bis das junge portugiesische Hausmädchen ihn versteht. Mit seinem ersten Roman seit vierzehn Jahren hat Milan Kundera einen Epilog zu seinem Œuvre geschrieben: das Porträt einer Epoche, die komisch ist, weil sie ihren Humor verloren hat.
©2013 / 2015 Milan Kundera / Hanser Verlag München. Übersetzung: Uli Aumüller (P)2015 Hessischer Rundfunk / Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg / Der Hörverlag