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Czech writer Milan Kundera’s most famous novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being has become a best seller in his homeland after a 20-year wait for its general release in his native language. The shelves of many large bookstores in Prague have been cleared of Kundera’s masterpiece within three weeks of its Czech release. Luxor has dispatched a letter to the publisher, Atlantis, warning of "the anger of its clients" faced with the insufficient number of copies. The reason for the delayed literary stampede is simple: before the Atlantis edition, Czechs had very restricted access to a book which, in spite of its international success, had never been printed in their country. The only Czech version was published in 1985 in Toronto, Canada by the publishing house, Sixty-Eight Publishers, run by two emigre writers, Josef Skvorecky and Zdena Salivarova. Their version followed hard on the heels of the initial publication in French of Kundera’s novel. The writer went into self-imposed exile in France in 1975. For the latest edition, Kundera has reworked the original text. "It was necessary to reconstruct the manuscript, partially lost, then compare it with the Skvorecky edition and above all with the French translation in which I introduced many small changes over 20 years," he explained in a postscript. The author is famous for his meticulous attention to the meaning of his words and the accuracy of their translation. Born, in 1929, Kundera has only returned sporadically, and always incognito, to his homeland since his departure for France. His international success has inspired and ambivalent mixture of admiration and spite. Banned by the earlier regime, the author described by the Czech weekly Tyden as an "unbearable agitator" now writes in French and his books, which he translates himself into Czech, are drip fed to readers. Seventeen years after the Velvet Revolution that toppled the communist regime, The Unbearable Lightness of Being becomes only the fourth of Kundera’s novels to be published in Czech, following in the wake of The Joke, The Farewell Waltz, and Immortality. A pirate translation of Identity appeared on the Internet in June, but patient Czech fans are still waiting for Slowness and, especially, Ignorance, which evokes the complex relations between those who opted for exile and those who chose to stick it out The long wait has given rise to a certain frustration, which has led some of Kundera’s compatriots to suspect him of treating them with contempt, as the Czech weekly Respekt recently underlined. "If The Unbearable Lightness of Being had been published during the great post-1989 boom, he could have sold five times as many," said a bookseller here. — AFP
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