Life Is Elsewhere

　　『生活在他方』是十九世紀法國詩人韓波的名言，昆德拉以此為名，構築出一部青春史詩。對年輕的心靈來說，當週遭的生活是如此地庸碌平淡，真實的生活似乎總是在他方；而詩歌、愛情與革命，便成了最浪漫的反抗。透過主人翁雅羅米爾的視界，奔放的情感現身為一首首動人的抒情詩，而在現實與夢境的交錯之中，讀者似乎也隨雅羅米爾活了一次，走向夢想的遠方……

　

　　★本書中譯版《生活在他方》由皇冠出版。

＂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.

作者簡介

米蘭．昆德拉

　　一九二九年生於捷克的布爾諾。一九七五年流亡移居法國。作品有長篇小說：《玩笑》、《賦別曲》 （榮獲義大利最佳外國文學獎）、《生活在他方》（榮獲法國文壇最高榮譽之一的『麥迪西大獎』）、《笑忘書》、《生命中不能承受之輕》、《不朽》、《緩 慢》、《身分》、《無知》；短篇小說集：《可笑的愛》；評論集：《小說的藝術》、《被背叛的遺囑》、《簾幕》；此外還有一部舞台劇本《雅克和他的主人》 （靈感來自狄德羅小說《宿命論者雅克和他的主人》）。

　　The French-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in the Czech Republic and has lived in France since 1975. He is the author of the internationally acclaimed and bestselling novels The Joke, Life is Elsewhere, The Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves -- all originally in Czech. His more recent novels , Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.