Opinion Express View on Milan Kundera: This absurdist drama
Kundera interrogated existential truths with a diaphanous lightness of form and expression
The hypermale gaze in his treatment of women characters is an area of darkness, redeemed only in part in his later books, where the women are more fully fleshed out and have greater agency. 
In an interview published in Paris Review in 1984, in the aftermath of the publication and adulatory reception to The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the Czech-born French writer Milan Kundera, who passed away at 94 recently, said, “My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form. Nor is this purely an artistic ambition. The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those that we play out on the great stage of History) and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being.”
The question that he posits in book after book is both philosophical and political: What is the ethical and cultural cost of idealism of any variant? Before he emigrated to France in 1975, after having been expelled a second time in 1970 from the Communist Party in what was then Czechoslovakia, Kundera was a man of many subterfuges. Thrown out from his academic’s job and virtually ineligible for any other after the expulsion, he worked as a jazz pianist; as a ghost writer for friends and, for a short period of time, even as a horoscope writer. These surreally diverse experiences form the foundations of the polyphonic literary universe built up by the writer of novels such as The Unbearable Lightness…, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) and Life is Elsewhere (1973), in which he serves the course of power as a cautionary tale, tending towards disillusionment, but never losing sight of its absurdist potential.
The hypermale gaze in his treatment of women characters is an area of darkness, redeemed only in part in his later books, where the women are more fully fleshed out and have greater agency. But the essential Kundera that readers will hold on to is the one who interrogates existential truths with a diaphanous lightness of form and expression, yet whose intellectual impact refuses to wane.
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