Life Is Elsewhere

Kundera originally planned to call this novel The Lyrical Age. In Kundera's opinion, youth is the lyrical age, and this novel is above all an epic of adolescence—an ironic epic that tenderly undermines sacred values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him to his love bed and to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character (horrifying yet completely innocent!), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He's no creep—he's Rimbaud. Rimbaud trapped by the communist revolution, trapped in a gloomy farce.