I’d never heard of this before: tearoom ambient, a style of music that arose in post-revolution Czechoslovakia, influenced by new age, ambient, and minimalism music newly imported from the west.
Milan Kundera’s 89 favourite words — and a love letter to Prague
Two short essays, translated into English for the first time, offer a coda on the late writer’s life-long preoccupations
When Milan Kundera died in 2023, the obituaries tended to close the curtain on The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the novel that made him a household name.
Two years later, there is a new coda to that legacy in the form of 89 Words Followed by Prague: A Disappearing Poem, a slim volume now translated into English for the first time. The work unites two short essays first published in the French intellectual periodical Le Débat in the 1980s: “89 Words,” a self-styled “personal dictionary,” and “Prague: A Disappearing Poem”, translated by Matt Reeck.
Taken together, they compress Kundera’s life-long preoccupations — the frailty of language, the ache of displacement, the endurance of irony — into less than 100 pages. The first piece begins in fury. In a tone half-comic, half-exasperated, Kundera recalls the mutilations his novels suffered at the hands of translators who rearranged sentences, removed digressions, even rewrote his style. “My translator,” he notes drily, “didn’t know a single word of Czech. ‘How did you translate it?’ I asked. ‘With my heart.’”
From that absurdity comes the essay’s conceit: a list of 89 words “you get hung up on, words you love”, each one a portal into the author’s mind. Entries range from “Absolute” and “Coatrack” to “Irony” and “Kitsch”. Some are elegant micro-essays: “Beauty: the last possible victory of a person who has lost hope. Beauty in art: the light subtly emanating from the never-said”. Others read like moral aphorisms disguised as lexicography. “Irony,” he writes, “isn’t a personal penchant of this or that writer. It’s the essence of the novel as an art form.”
Others still are hilarious: “Immobile and stuck on the face; a sign of extraordinary wickedness.” He was referring to a smile. What emerges is a miniature autobiography of a humane writer in exile turning over every syllable of his craft.
If “89 Words” looks inwards to language, “Prague: A Disappearing Poem” turns outwards, towards the city from which Kundera was exiled by Czechoslovakia’s communist authorities in 1975. It is a beautiful, elegiac essay, written five years before “89 Words”, that reads like a love letter to a city that has already slipped away into the past. Kundera’s Prague is a city of paradox, a “capital of magic” where Franz Kafka’s nightmares and Leo Janáček’s great operas sprang from the same cobbled streets. He sees in its history the predicament of central Europe itself: a civilisation wedged between empires, condemned to watch its own disappearance.
Together, these essays form a kind of retrospective, distilling Kundera’s philosophy and his vision of Europe’s history with lines so clear in their insight into political oppression and resurgent empires that we are left marvelling, and sometimes chastened, at how little seems to have changed since they were written. Nevertheless, Kundera’s reflections are rallying, even hopeful: small nations, he reminds us, possess a genius capable of penetrating the arrogance of the large. “
Its humour corroded the horrors of ideological seriousness. Its concreteness stood against the largest reductive forces that History had ever unleashed.” Here is a celebration of the cultural and intellectual resilience of the small in the face of oppressive power. In an age of AI and disinformation, forces that by turns flatten and manipulate speech,
Kundera’s vigilance over language feels especially poignant. Here, the émigré who once mourned the betrayal of his mother tongue finally seems at peace with words.
89 Words followed by Prague, A Disappearing Poem by Milan Kundera translated by Matt Reeck Faber, £12.99, 92 pages
