I finished reading Milan Kundera's first novel "The Joke" this week and he just died on Tuesday

It's an interesting analysis of the dark emotions that lurk deeply in our human psyche.

I don't think I am expert enough to make a thorough diagnosis to discover what the book is all about.

So I have decided not to write a review as my bad judgments could amount to ruining the interest of potential readers who might want to check out his first novel.

By the way, I read the 1992 English translation, the fifth attempt, which he said he was most satisfied with.

I read his other and most popular novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" several years ago.

I very much enjoyed it but once again have to admit that I am at a loss of analyzing the book deep enough to arrive at a fair analysis that could amount to a review.

So suffice to say that these are two books I highly recommend to all book lovers and literary enthusiasts to check out.

Below are some excerpts from The New York Times article about his death at the age of 94:

"...Because the more men think, the more one man’s thought diverges from another’s. And finally, because man is never what he thinks he is.”

Too late, he said, he realized that the evil done in the name of Socialism was not a betrayal of the revolution but rather a poison inherent in it from the beginning.

“…to describe a world in which choice is exhausted and people simply cannot find a way to express their humanity.”

Mr. Kundera had a deep affinity for Central European thinkers and artists — Nietzsche, Kafka, the Viennese novelists Robert Musil and Hermann Broch, the Czech composer Leos Janacek. Like Broch, Mr. Kundera said, he strove to discover “that which the novel alone can discover,” including what he called “the truth of uncertainty.”

In his 1980 Times review, Mr. Updike commented that Mr. Kundera’s struggle “makes the life histories of most American writers look as stolid as the progress of a tomato plant, and it is small wonder that Kundera is able to merge personal and political significances with the ease of a Camus.”

“It may be that when Kundera writes about laughter,” she wrote, “he conceives of it not as a subjective expression of appreciation or surprise, the way we usually understand it, but as a material form of aggression, an actual act of self-defense, even a duty.”

As Mr. Kundera himself wrote in “Insignificance”: “We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There’s been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously.”