Milan Kundera - Let The Old Dead Make Room For The Young Dead (Faber, 2019) ****

Once in a while I check whether anything new was published by some of my favourite authors. Milan Kundera is one of them. I have read everything he's written (as long as it's available in English, French or Dutch), but then I find this little gem, by browsing the internet. It's only fourty pages long, more a short story than a novel, but published as a little book.

It's the story of a woman who meets a former - and younger - lover in the street, so many years after her own husband died. Actually, she travelled to his city to secure a place for her dead husband in the local cimetery, but his tomb has been replaced by a new corpse because she forgot to extend the lease. This explains the title of the story, which in turn captures the renewed sense of attraction between the woman and the man. Is what happened to them so many years ago still alive today? Can they continue where they left off? Can the reality of now replace the memories of then?

Kundera's writing is brilliant: sensitive, subtle, erotic, inventive, balanced, concise, precise, ... it raises questions of psychology, sociology and philosophy by one simple situation. As the omniscient narrator, Kundera can dive deep in their choices, in the difference between what is said and what is thought, what is done with firm decision or full of uncertainty.