On not re-reading Milan Kundera

About ten years ago, I thought I'd reread Milan Kundera, whose novels I had been so engaged with in the mid-1980s that I even made a few (failed) steps to learn Czech. Instead of picking up an English translation of one of his books, I turned to the French translation of "L'Insoutenable Légèreté de l'être"; after all, Kundera and his French translator went through the translations of his works in the late 1980s, and he authorized their use for translations into other languages. But soon after I started reading, I stopped. I'd somehow accepted it back in the 1980s, but now I was put off by "the unbearable misogyny of Kundera". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 18 July 2023)