Milan Kundera’s "Life Elsewhere" Summary

This is the story of the coming-of-age and death of a Prague youth, Jaromil, whose domestic insecurities and thirst for recognition lead him to become a political informer after the 1948 coup. Kundera initially titled the manuscript "Lyrical Age," later changing the title at the request of his publishers to a phrase by Arthur Rimbaud that Parisian students scrawled on the walls of the Sorbonne in May 1968. The idea was born out of the writer’s trauma, when his idol, Paul Éluard, publicly approved the execution of his Prague friend. The novel was completed in the Czech Republic in 1970, amid the Soviet invasion and the banning of the author’s books in his homeland, and the afterword is dated 1986.

The book was first published in France in 1973, translated by François Querelle. That same year, the novel earned Milan Kundera the prestigious French Medici Prize for best foreign work.

Alabaster Apollo and the Dog-Headed Men

The daughter of a wealthy Prague pharmacy and perfume shop owner becomes pregnant by a poor engineer. He suggests an abortion with a gynecologist he knows. The girl’s parents force the engineer into the marriage, provide a dowry for a construction company, and settle the newlyweds on the top floor of their villa. In the bedroom stands an alabaster statue of Apollo with a lyre, on which the husband mockingly hangs his hat, shoe, or smelly sock. The insulted wife prays to the statue, hoping for the child to resemble the ancient god, and names the newborn Jaromil.

His mother sleeps with her son until he’s six, jotting down his rhymes in a dark red diary and hanging posters around the nursery with his phrases like "Life is like a weed." At school, the boy is ridiculed for his girlish blouses and the hairpins in his long hair. He is friends only with his father, grandfather, his dog Alik, and the school janitor’s strongman son, with whom he and Yaromil flog a neatly dressed boy with nettles in a vacant lot. In his sketchbooks, Yaromil draws soccer players and generals with dog faces because he can’t draw human faces.

After a night in which his drunken wife futilely demands a second child, the engineer confesses he never wanted children with her. Soon, the 1938 mobilization begins, German tanks arrive, the grandfather dies from a stroke caused by a shop assistant stealing from him, and the mother takes her son to a riverside resort. There, an art teacher with a black shepherd praises the dog-headed people’s drawings for their original inner world. In Prague, the teenager visits this artist in his attic studio with black masks, looks at albums by Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí, and then brings back a secret notebook containing drawings of decapitated women on bonfires and stakes.

The mother comes to the teacher to complain about pornography. He makes her squat in front of a painting and makes love to her on the paint-spattered ottoman, while Yaromil, who has arrived for class, waits and paints in the next room. During their secret affair, the artist forces his mistress to read books by Paul Éluard, paints her face and the wrinkled post-pregnancy belly she hates with black ink, and photographs her in an empty bathtub under the shower hose. After a nervous breakdown and a course of sleep therapy, she writes him a farewell letter.

Meanwhile, the Gestapo executes the maid Magda’s fiancé. Jaromil seals the keyhole with a piece of bread, hides the key, and spies on a naked, crying Magda washing herself in the bathtub. Catching her gaze through the keyhole, he hesitates to enter, citing a forgotten brush. Disgusted by his own cowardice, he sits down at his desk and composes a poem about water love in free verse, which he types out on his grandfather’s typewriter.

Jump from Charles Bridge

Xaver, a repeater of high school, skips Latin and math classes in the spring after the war. Walking across Charles Bridge, he throws his brown schoolbag out the open fourth-floor window of a yellow building and jumps after it. A pale woman with huge brown eyes enters the room with the canary in the rococo cage.

The policeman’s boots stomp on the stairs; Xaver hides under a bed with a torn straw mattress, sneezing from the straw tickling his nose, then jumps out and locks the policeman who peers into the pot-bellied oak closet. After banging on the door with his baton, the young man falls asleep on the bed, falling into a new dream: he hops on a moving night train with schoolchildren skiing. In the train’s washroom, a fifty-year-old Czech teacher embraces an excellent student, and in a mountain bar, Xaver dances with a wrinkled woman in a dark red sweater, rolls her in the snow, and caresses her by the lighted window, in front of a freezing blonde classmate in a light white dress.

Having fallen asleep in an old woman’s room, he finds himself at an underground meeting where a man in a cap demands a list of enemies to be executed on the day of the revolution — the list, however, was left on the last page of a notebook on Czech stylistics in his briefcase by Charles Bridge. Saving his unit from a raid, Xaver leads the underground fighters across rooftops under floodlights to the sounds of Chopin’s Funeral March. He wakes up in a mountain cabin and throws a handful of earth and snow into the grave of a frozen, blonde classmate. A hand strokes his cheek: he wakes up by Charles Bridge, sees armed workers in blue overalls on the bridge, checks the list in his briefcase, rejects the kneeling woman who owns the room, and strides to the window.

Twenty cut pipes

Jaromil’s father never returns home and dies in a concentration camp; his widow hangs his portrait in a gilded frame, and the ground floor of the villa is occupied by the noisy family of his sister, whose husband believes Voltaire invented the volt. Soon, a relative of the dead Jewish woman tells the widow that the engineer had been in love with a young Jewish woman since before the war, had sneaked into the Terezin ghetto to see her, and was captured on his second attempt. The widow hides the portrait behind a closet and tries unsuccessfully to bring back the now-disillusioned artist.

Jaromil suffers from his childish face with its receding chin, seeks a resemblance to Rainer Maria Rilke, ties his penis to his leg with tape during dates in Stromovka Park, and writes poems about the merging of bodies in moss and the love of two frail old men. After his mother combs his tousled hair in front of guests, he joins a dark-haired young man’s Marxist circle, meets a bespectacled student, and strolls with her in the freezing cold without a hat or vest. Before a promised date in an empty apartment, he contracts a sore throat, with a fever of 38°C, and practices masturbation. That morning, he hears Klement Gottwald’s speech on the radio in Old Town Square about the February Revolution of 1948.

The uncle bursts into the room shouting, "This is a real putsch!" and slaps his nephew for uttering the phrase, "The working class will one day wring your neck." Later, Yaromil struggles to undo the hook of a student’s skirt, is offended by her laughter when she suggests they retire to a dark bedroom, and while spending the night at a villa with a condom packet in his pajama pocket, he suffers a fiasco due to a lost erection and lies about being in the shadow of another woman.

In the artist’s studio, he is called a child and a virgin, like Rimbaud, to which the young man defends socialist realism and the relegation of Baudelaire to the trash heap, breaking with his teacher forever. That summer, abandoned by a student, Jaromil cuts off twenty telephone receivers in twenty days with a knife and sends them by parcel to the famous avant-garde poet, who had not responded to his letter. At the post office, he meets the son of the school janitor — now a married police officer with a baby and a bottle of moonshine in the closet — decides to enroll in a higher political school and escapes from the beach on the Vltava, where his mother and three friends are trying to shield him with a white towel to change into swimming trunks.

The red-haired saleswoman and the arrest

His uncle is sentenced to five years in prison for fraud, his stores are confiscated, his aunt and cousin are evicted from Prague, and the first floor of the villa is given to a large proletarian family. His grandmother dies. Jaromil abandons poetry, hangs a photo of his father in an officer’s uniform from 1938 on the wall, tests the credibility of professors during Youth Union exams, and boos a famous surrealist poet during a debate. While preparing for May Day of 1949, he writes slogans like "Dream is Reality" and "Imagination to Power," until a district party official replaces them with a list from the newspaper "Rude Pravo."

On a holiday, he enviously encounters a famous poet on the arm of a beautiful woman on the street. In the evening, he peers into the basement window of a building where a black-haired cashier who resembles Magda frequents the premises, and stumbles upon her skinny, red-haired saleswoman. The next day, May 2nd, the red-haired woman announces the cashier’s departure for marriage, takes Yaromil to her place, and quickly deflowers him on a woolen blanket.

He returns to rhymed verses about Lenin, a jasmine-scented sailboat, striking Marseille, and the female tractor driver of the future, publishes in "Ruda Pravo" (Red-Haired Law), and calls himself "Red-Haired," after the fictional dreamer Xaver. During a game of medical examination, he becomes jealous of his girlfriend’s gynecologists and her first village lover, squeezing her throat. Having won the right to take the girl to his room, he plies her with wine, and her mother, overhearing her groans, bursts in on them under the pretext of helping her with stomach cramps and thrusts sugar with twenty drops of medicine into the naked girl under the blanket.

At the invitation of the gatekeeper’s son, who told him over beer about the arrest of a dark-haired Marxist, Yaromil travels with ten poets to perform at a suburban school run by the National Security Corps. There, they are filmed by a dark-eyed film student, and during a discussion about socialist love, a one-legged watchman with a crutch spends twenty minutes arguing over the relocation of a bus stop two hundred meters to the factory. That evening, at the filmmaker’s apartment, a sixty-year-old poet and an editor (who urinated with Yaromil from the balcony) leave the young couple alone, and the young man flees in terror, embarrassed by the loose gray underwear with a slit in the stomach, given to him by his mother.

Soon, the filmmaker and her rejuvenated mother secretly write a script and film a movie about him, forcing him to gape silently while dubbing near the boulders outside Prague, where he was conceived. On the day of the first snow, the redhead is twenty minutes late for a date; driven to distraction by the threat of a breakup, she confesses that she was saying goodbye to her brother, the former chauffeur of an anti-communist minister, who is illegally fleeing the country the day after tomorrow. After a passionate, tearful encounter, convinced that the redhead won’t commit suicide if he dies, Jaromil rips his beige underwear with his teeth, puts on yellow underwear, and dictates a denunciation of his friend’s brother in the state security building. Then, through the gates, he watches two men drive her away in a car.

A night in a baron’s loft and an icy balcony

Three years after Yaromil’s death, a red-haired woman in a winter coat, just released from prison, rings the doorbell at the barn of a forty-year-old former British air force pilot, exiled from the army to work in a factory and reading classical authors on a blackboard across a hot tub. She was his longtime, pliant lover, who regaled him with stories of lesbians and admirers.

It turns out that on that winter evening, she was late for Yaromil’s visit precisely from the forty-year-old, where she had come to say goodbye forever, out of honesty with the young poet. She had made up the story of her brother’s escape on the fly to justify her tardiness. Her brother was still in prison. Upon learning that the poet had died of illness and lay beneath a black monument bearing the inscription, "Here Lies a Poet," she dined on the forty-year-old’s bread, ham, and sardines. But she screamed and broke free from his embrace and fled to the corner of the room, remembering the riders on enormous horses she had seen at the prison gates that morning, repeating, "It’s a shame you’re not an old woman or an old man."

Three years ago, a sick Yaromil, wearing a suit and winter coat, was riding the tram to a party hosted by a film actress. There, a thirty-year-old friend of the artist, who had been expelled from school and was working as a day laborer on a construction site, called the young man’s poetry "disgusting rants" in front of everyone. In response to Yaromil’s assertion that the modernist and his defender were long dead, the man grabbed the poet, who was attacking him with his fists, by the collar and pants, carried him across the room to general laughter, and kicked him out onto the frosty concrete balcony.

Fearing ridicule, the young man dares neither jump from the low balcony nor re-enter. He urinates on the concrete, holding his penis with trembling hands, and through the curtain, he sees a female filmmaker copulating with a man under a pink lampshade. At home, he falls ill with a fever and pneumonia; his mother dismisses the forty-year-old lawyer for the arrested redhead who came to explain himself with the words, "Everything he does is for the good of the working class." She takes down her husband’s photo from the wall, tells her dying son that his father demanded an abortion, and Yaromil dies delirious, looking at his mother’s face, looming over him, as if it were a surface of water.