Immortality
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Immortality
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Narrated by:
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Richmond Hoxie
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By:
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Milan Kundera
About this listen
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 PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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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.
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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."
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4 out of 5 stars
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The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 220
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 179
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Story4 out of 5 stars 179
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.
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A well-lubricated orgy of ideas
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Laughable Loves
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- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Really hard to follow
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By: Milan Kundera
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Farewell Waltz
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 26
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 23
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Story4 out of 5 stars 24
In this dark farce of a novel, set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American (at once saint and Don Juan); a popular trumpeter and his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife; an disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward. Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy.
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2 out of 5 stars
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didn't agree well.
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By: Milan Kundera, and others
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Life Is Elsewhere
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- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 30
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 24
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Story4 out of 5 stars 24
The author initially intended to call this novel 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 sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. 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.
-
3 out of 5 stars
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eh
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By: Milan Kundera, and others
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The Joke
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 130
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 112
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 112
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.
-
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- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,202
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,918
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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."
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
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-
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- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 220
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 179
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 179
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.
-
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-
A well-lubricated orgy of ideas
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- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 50
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 41
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 41
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.
-
1 out of 5 stars
-
Really hard to follow
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By: Milan Kundera
-
Farewell Waltz
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 26
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 23
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 24
In this dark farce of a novel, set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American (at once saint and Don Juan); a popular trumpeter and his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife; an disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward. Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy.
-
2 out of 5 stars
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didn't agree well.
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- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 30
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 24
-
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The author initially intended to call this novel 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 sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. 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.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
eh
- By Amazon Customer on 02-18-25
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
Ignorance
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 35
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 28
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 28
Irena and Josef meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence "their memories no longer match."
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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Slowness
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 3 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 40
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 39
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 39
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 .
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5 out of 5 stars
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Well done
- By Liam SR on 05-25-19
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
- A Novel
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Rupert Degas
- Length: 26 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 5,566
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 4,953
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 4,951
In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.
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4 out of 5 stars
-
Wonderful book, flawed narration.
- By REBECCA on 02-08-14
By: Haruki Murakami
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
- By: Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 6,473
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 5,670
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 5,673
One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.
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1 out of 5 stars
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What in the heck happened?????
- By Melinda on 02-05-14
By: Gabriel García Márquez, and others
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The Art of the Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 38
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 34
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Informative and Inspiring
- By Mo on 11-27-21
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
Killing Commendatore
- A Novel
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator, Ted Goossen - translator
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 28 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,679
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,416
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2,408
In Killing Commendatore, a 30-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a previously unseen painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious 13-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
A Masterpiece and A Good Novel To Start
- By Elif Kaya on 10-18-18
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
-
Kafka on the Shore
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett, Oliver Le Sueur
- Length: 19 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 5,542
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 4,899
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 4,892
With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.
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4 out of 5 stars
-
What's better than Murakami? More Murakami
- By Dr. Curmudgeon on 04-11-14
By: Haruki Murakami
-
Labyrinths
- Selected Stories & Other Writings
- By: Jorge Luis Borges
- Narrated by: Dominic Keating
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 152
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 121
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 118
The groundbreaking trans-genre work of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) has been insinuating itself into the structure, stance, and very breath of world literature for well over half a century. Multi-layered, self-referential, elusive, and allusive writing is now frequently labelled Borgesian.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Look, this is Borges
- By Lars Spuybroek on 05-27-20
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The Man Without Qualities
- By: Robert Musil
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 60 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 55
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 46
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 47
In 1913, the Viennese aristocracy is gathering to celebrate the 17th jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef, even as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is collapsing and the rest of Vienna is showing signs of rebellion. At the centre of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: a veteran, a seducer and a scientist, yet also a man 'without qualities' and therefore a brilliant and detached observer of his changing world.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
An unmatched intellectual epic
- By Delano on 06-23-22
By: Robert Musil
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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
- In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: George Saunders, Phylicia Rashad, Nick Offerman, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 686
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 534
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 527
For the last 20 years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
An innovative and fresh listening experience
- By Scott Garrioch on 01-14-21
By: George Saunders
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In Search of Lost Time (Dramatized)
- By: Marcel Proust
- Narrated by: James Wilby, Jonathan Firth, Harriet Walter, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 643
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 570
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 568
Featuring a fictional version of himself - 'Marcel' - and a host of friends, acquaintances, and lovers, In Search of Lost Time is Proust's search for the key to the mysteries of memory, time, and consciousness. As he recalls his childhood days, the sad affair of Charles Swann and Odette de Crecy, his transition to manhood, the tortures of love and the ravages of war, he realises that the simplest of discoveries can lead to astonishing possibilities.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Proust Snapshot
- By Wendy on 05-06-14
By: Marcel Proust
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1Q84
- By: Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin - translator, Philip Gabriel - translator
- Narrated by: Allison Hiroto, Marc Vietor, Mark Boyett
- Length: 46 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 10,813
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 9,522
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Story4 out of 5 stars 9,497
The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.
A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 - "Q" is for "question mark". A world that bears a question....
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5 out of 5 stars
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WOW, WOW, WOW.
- By Amanda on 11-06-11
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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- By: Milan Kundera
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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.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Adder Sowing Thorns in the Garden of the Soul
- By W Perry Hall on 02-28-17
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-
Ignorance
- A Novel
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- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 35
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 28
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Irena and Josef meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence "their memories no longer match."
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A Kidnapped West
- The Tragedy of Central Europe
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- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 1 hr and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2
Milan Kundera’s early nonfiction work feels especially resonant in our own time. In these pieces, Kundera pleads the case of the “small nations” of Europe who, by culture, are Western with deep roots in Europe, despite Russia imposing its own Communist political regimes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Kundera warns that the real tragedy here is not Russia but Europe, whose own identity and culture are directly challenged and threatened in a way that could lead to their destruction.
By: Milan Kundera
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Laughable Loves
- By: Milan Kundera
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- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 220
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 179
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-
4 out of 5 stars
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- A Novel
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-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,925
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."
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4 out of 5 stars
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Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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The Joke
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 130
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 112
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 112
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.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Adder Sowing Thorns in the Garden of the Soul
- By W Perry Hall on 02-28-17
By: Milan Kundera
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Ignorance
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 28
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Story4 out of 5 stars 28
Irena and Josef meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence "their memories no longer match."
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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A Kidnapped West
- The Tragedy of Central Europe
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 1 hr and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2
Milan Kundera’s early nonfiction work feels especially resonant in our own time. In these pieces, Kundera pleads the case of the “small nations” of Europe who, by culture, are Western with deep roots in Europe, despite Russia imposing its own Communist political regimes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Kundera warns that the real tragedy here is not Russia but Europe, whose own identity and culture are directly challenged and threatened in a way that could lead to their destruction.
By: Milan Kundera
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Laughable Loves
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 50
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 41
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Story4 out of 5 stars 41
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.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Really hard to follow
- By Ingrid on 02-07-24
By: Milan Kundera
Great lit? Bad audiobook
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Cerebral Crosswinds in Parisian fields
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Lovely & Philosophical
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Very challenging...
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