In a 1984 interview with the British writer lan McEwan, Kundera said: "We constantly rewrite our own biographies and continually give matters new meanings. To rewrite history in this senseindeed, in an Orwellian sense—is not at all inhuman. On the contrary, it is very human." He strictly controls public information about his life; in the latest French editions of his works, his "official biography" consists of one sentence: "Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia in 1929 and since 1975 has been living in France."
Kundera also asserts his right as an author to exclude from his oeuvre "immature" and "unsuccessful" works, as composers do, and he now rejects and suppresses most of his literary output of the 1950s and the 1960s. In his mature fiction he creates a self-contained world that he constantly analyzes and questions, opening up multitudinous ways of interpreting the incidents he depicts. As Kvetoslav Chvatik points out, Kundera treats the novel as an ambiguous structure of signs; playing with these signs enables him to show human existence as open to countless possibilities, thus freeing human beings from the limitedness of a single unrepeatable life.
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