Life Is Elsewhere

Jaromil is a young poet in Communist Czechoslovakia, the product of a mother so completely invested in his genius that she has made him incapable of any relationship not mediated by her approval. As he grows into adulthood, his talent (which is real) and his emotional immaturity (which is catastrophic) collide with the revolutionary politics of his moment — producing a tragedy that is also, in Kundera’s hands, a sustained meditation on the relationship between art and youth, between lyrical idealism and its political consequences.

Kundera described Life Is Elsewhere as an attempt to understand ‘the eternal triangle of poet, revolution, and woman’ — and the result is one of his most psychologically acute novels, a portrait of a specific kind of artistic narcissism with implications well beyond its historical setting.

Underrated even among Kundera devotees, this is the novel that most fully demonstrates his range. Essential reading. Published by Faber & Faber.