How the Unbearable Lightness of Being enthralled a generation

If during the 80s and 90s you were any kind of book lover, Milan Kundera – who died this week aged 94 – was one of that small clutch of modern novelists you absolutely had to read. In the late stages of the Cold War, the Czech-born Kundera not only gave us news about what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain – how those brought up under communism joked, suffered, survived and made love – but his irony and playfulness, oddly hard-nosed, caught the spirit of the times. To read him as a teenager was in many ways to be wrenched into adulthood and realise there were other countries, other ways of seeing – in fact, quite different moral systems – beyond your own. So many of us fell under his spell and have never quite emerged from it.

It was the Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) almost everyone started off with, his breakthrough novel about the lives, loves and interior philosophies of four different characters during the Prague Spring of the 1960s and its subsequent, monstrous crushing by the Kremlin.