Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Life Is Elsewhere
    Life Is Elsewhere
    Life Is Elsewhere
    Audiobook10 hours

    Life Is Elsewhere

    Written by Milan Kundera and Aaron Asher

    Narrated by Richmond Hoxie

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    ""I will say no more about this lacerating book except to urge it upon all who care about literature in our difficult era."" — Boston Globe

    ""A sly and merciless lampoon of revolutionary romanticism. . . Kundera commits some of the funniest literary savaging since Evelyn Waugh polished off Dickens in A Handful of Dust.""— Time

    Milan Kundera initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to him, 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. Rimbaud entrapped by the communist revolution, entrapped in a somber farce.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateAug 21, 2012
    ISBN9780062215604
    Life Is Elsewhere
    Author

    Milan Kundera

    The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929 - 2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves—all originally in Czech. His later novels, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance, and The Festival of Insignificance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.

    More audiobooks from Milan Kundera

    Related to Life Is Elsewhere

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      THE Reading room

      Oct 6, 2019

      THE Reading room
      2 min read

    • Article

      Poets

      Dec 1, 2020

      Poets
      19 min read

    • Article

      Books Only a Mother Could Love

      May 10, 2019

      Books Only a Mother Could Love
      5 min read

    • Article

      I Met Fear on the Hill

      Dec 15, 2018

      It’s the summer of 1966, and Sheila and Peter are a young married couple living in Berkeley. They are very much in love, and also very high—tripping on acid for the first time in their lives, in Tilden Park—walking in a shallow stream full of primord

      32 min read

    • Article

      Great Read

      Nov 2, 2023

      Great Read
      8 min read

    • Article

      THE room Reading

      Feb 24, 2021

      THE room Reading
      3 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Sep 16, 2019

      Books
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Spellbook

      Sep 2, 2020

      The Spellbook
      4 min read

    • Article

      Great Read

      Jun 16, 2021

      Great Read
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Wisdom of Women Shines in Najla Jraissaty Khoury’s ‘Pearls on a Branch: Oral Tales’

      Oct 22, 2018

      Long, long ago These things happened or maybe no. Let’s start with the image on the cover. Three women sit in a courtyard. One holds a long-handled pan over a coal brazier; the other two, one of whom has her back to us, hold small cups. They wear ide

      7 min read

    • Article

      MYSTERY & SUSPENSE

      Feb 17, 2023

      By JOANNA NADIN Mantle It’s 1988 and 17-year-old Jason wants more from life than small-town poverty in Cornwall and an abusive drunk for a father. When a group of posh 20-somethings come to stay for a beach holiday, he gets a glimpse of his dream li

      3 min read

    • Article

      THE Reading room

      Mar 25, 2020

      THE Reading room
      5 min read

    • Article

      Mother Tongue

      Feb 24, 2021

      Mother Tongue
      12 min read

    • Article

      Autumn Reading

      Mar 25, 2020

      A charming novel about a ready-to-retire Paris psychiatrist, who is counting the hours until his final session. Our protagonist has never spoken to his next-door neighbour, although he hears the old gent rattling around at night. He has never enquire

      7 min read

    • Article

      STEPPING Out

      Feb 26, 2020

      STEPPING Out
      10 min read

    • Article

      Four Of A Kind

      May 3, 2023

      Four Of A Kind
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Life Is Elsewhere

    4/5

    387 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Not my favorite Kundera, I had to rather slog through this one. Mostly about how poetry can be used as a vehicle to escape ones life. Many of the same themes as depicted in his other work, this one, because of its rather non-linear structure and its different narrators, is a bit more challenging.
    • 5/5
      A great psychological profile of a young man & his relationship to his mother & various loves. It is also a complex reflection of poetics, negotiating the positions between the extremes of socialist realism & a poetry of 'the absolute', suggesting that whilst you cannot rely on political dogma for your muse, the 'true' experience of life will still pass you by as it is so elusive, & art is dependent on many, often hidden or unpredictable contingencies.
    • 5/5
      An excellent reading of a wonderfully funny—and disturbing—and sad—novel. The reader’s voice captures the irony always lurking in Kundera’s prose.
    • 3/5
      My late 20s illustrated a certain cooling of conviction. It was a grassy hill in early spring, I believe I had bought this new and found my own views on poetry and revolution echoed, Hell, anticipated by Kundera. This is a novel of resignation.
    • 4/5
      Like falling from one dream into another this novel takes you on a journey into the adolescence of a poet. Peeling away layers of personality the poet protagonist is revealed to be a human with all the ridiculous accouterments that attend to the artist. For those who enjoy ideas and feeling the sublime this is a great novel.
    • 5/5
      Holy crap, this book was great. I mean, as long as you don't like pleasant books about nice people. It's vicious. And thank God, the lead character stopped reminding me of the worst things about me eventually.

    • 3/5
      I remember reading this - but have almost no recollection of the book's contents...
    • 4/5
      Rereading Life Is Elsewhere, I had the feeling as though I was traveling back to my adolescent years when I read the book for the first time. The protagonist, Jaromil the poet, leads a life observing and reacting towards others’ views on him. In Kundera’s words, he lives in a ‘mirrored world’. Needless to say, he is unhappy, insecure and emotionally disturbed.The tragedy is planted at the start of the novel, when Jaromil’s conception is unwelcome by his father. This is a life that is not meant to exist, a life that is always better in somewhere else. But then, ’somewhere’ is a space of non-existence. The eagerness to prove his existence makes Jaromil draw headless sketches, eavesdropping adults’ comments about him, writes and memorizes poems to impress men and women, and voices offensive opinions.Women play important roles in Jaromil’s life. His relationship with his mother is complicated - it’s dependency rather than love. In fact, he relies on the women - from his mother to the first girls he dated, to the redhead girl,and finally the filmmaker - around him to reassured himself the worthiness of his existence.Kundera is the master of the craft. The self-conscious narrator appears natural. The inclusion of Xarvier, the character in Jaromil’s dream, as his alter-ego to subtly reflect his vulnerability and frustration (that he can never achieve what he wishes but Xarvier would) is a superior plot. This is evident when the redhead girl, the only person who loves him, calls out Xarvier’s name during their intimacy; and later, Jaromil sees Xarvier makes love with the young filmmaker.Life is always elsewhere, when you can’t grasp the meaning of life.