Jacques and His Master: An Homage to Diderot in Three Acts - Softcover

Kundera, Milan

3.75

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9780060912222: Jacques and His Master: An Homage to Diderot in Three Acts

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060912227 ISBN 13: 9780060912222

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1994

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Jacques and His Master is a deliciously witty and entertaining play by Milan Kundera, the acclaimed Franco-Czech author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

A highly original variation on Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot's novel Jacques le Fataliste, Jacques and His Master has been successfully staged all over the world. This new translation by Simon Callow has been authorized by Kundera as the definitive edition.

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From the Back Cover:

Jacques and His Master is a deliciously witty and entertaining "variation" on Diderot's novel Jacques le Fatalist, written for Milan Kundera's "private pleasure" in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.

When the "heavy Russian irrationality" fell on Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera explains, he felt drawn to the spirit of the eighteenth century—"And it seemed to me that nowhere was it to be found more densely concentrated than in that banquet of intelligence, humor, and fantasy, Jacques le Fataliste."

The upshot was this "Homage to Diderot," which has now been performed throughout the United States and Europe. Here, Jacques and His Master, newly translated by Simon Callow, is a text that will delight Kundera's admirers throughout the English-speaking world.

About the Author:

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves—all originally written in Czech. His most 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.