TEHRAN – The Book City Institute in Tehran plans to review Iranian writer Aref Daniali’s latest book on the Czech-born French writer Milan Kundera in a session on Tuesday.

“Milan Kundera: Modern Ulysses” has recently been published by Hermes in Tehran.

Daniali has been invited to attend the session, which will begin at 3 pm. Book City Institute director Ali-Asghar Mohammadkhani will also deliver a speech.

The book centers on Kudera’s oeuvre to track the numerous ideas that have been illustrated in the writer’s works, the Book City Institute said in a statement for the session.

In concurrence with Kundera, Daniali believes that nothing is as reliable as authors’ books to help introduce them and books reflect the lives of their creators.

The book doesn’t follow a planned or abstract and general formula.
 
Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czech citizenship was revoked in 1979 and restored in 2019.

He “sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in bookstores.”

Kundera’s best-known work is “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, which has been published in Persian.

Prior to the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia banned his books. He leads a low-profile life and rarely speaks to the media.

He was thought to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was also a nominee for other awards.

He was awarded the 1985 Jerusalem Prize, the 1987 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 2000 Herder Prize. 

In 2021, he received the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia.

The Persian translation of his novels “The Farewell Waltz”, “Life Is Elsewhere”, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”, “The Festival of Insignificance”, “Identity”, “Immortality”, “Slowness” and “Ignorance” have been published by different publishers.

Photo: A poster for a review session for “Milan Kundera: Modern Ulysses” by Iranian writer Artef Daniali at the Book City Institute in Tehran.

MMS/YAW