Future people: multiculturalism and the one Kundera book you will actually read, if you read any? A prediction! Author's name (parents' draft): Terence Rajivan Edward (now Doctor) Dialogue on names (fictional): "Now why do you want a name?" So that my works can be identified - that is one reason. "You need a number really." Author's name (my first draft): 0161__Rajivan Abstract. Okay, I shall tell you why I write as I do! This paper predicts that the one book of Kundera which will be most read by future people is not his most famous, namely The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It is The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, on which I have written so much. Liberal social justice mixed with a Sandellian portrait of human nature leads to this prediction, as does perhaps the vision of a socially just society without this portrait. I respond to Taiye Selasi's article "Where to start with: Milan Kundera." Selasi recommends The Unbearable Lightness of Being if you read only one. Maybe she believes this, but even if not, how do you write one of these newspaper articles and recommend another one? "I know most readers with some interest in literature associate Kundera with this book, but actually this earlier one is better. It is better because…" It is either not doable or too demanding on one's resources. It suits a whole essay rather than this helpful survey. Draft version: version 2 (29th May 2026, minor edits; version 1, 8th October 2025) Software used (freeware): Google docs, google.com PDF at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396331451_Future_people_multiculturalism_and_the_one_Kundera_book_you_will_actually_read "I'm giving this rot One shot" Some years ago - it was only three actually - I compared Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting to ethnic minority fiction. Ethnic minorities, or many of them, like disciplines with objective tests of ability. "I can prove myself when there is a mathematics test. With essays, can't the teacher always favour those she regards as her people?" (Let's not contest this way of thinking here.) Now imagine someone who thinks like this and is forced into fiction writing. They might write like Kundera in that book. Short sections. Flashy section openings. Fairytale touch, eroticism if religion will permit it, superbly chosen metaphors, brilliant wit, literary celebrities, and more. Mona Arshi's Somebody Loves You seems similar to me, though not of that stature, and Rose Macaulay's Told by an idiot from decades earlier and Laura Riding's Progress of Stories. (I suspect some people think only men would try this, maybe even have some evidence of this thought; women would respond, "If I have to do this to get in, forget it!" Whatever! By the way, I have met various people whose reaction to me is "I am giving you a very small window to communicate and it had best be good," usually overseas students, women! I don't think of them as horrible. They are probably thinking, "That is what it's like for a person of your level from my country and your position is no better." Or "How will you get married otherwise?" They could also think: "I am fitting in with the local English culture; I am engaging in a bizarre moral project." And maybe even: "You would probably do this to me, if you were rational.") Let's leave aside the ethnic minority fiction claim for a paragraph. Kundera's book is also important, for him anyway, because of the following reactions. First reaction: someone reads The Joke and thinks, "Solid novel, but are there not solid novelists in lots of countries and ones who have suffered at the hands of a regime." My friend and I had this reaction in our teens. Second reaction: someone reads Life is Elsewhere and thinks, "The school bully wrote a novel, did he?" They are likely to give a very little window to Kundera: "Clever man but he better be always at his best or forget it." Between The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting it is as if Kundera cruelly consumed a modernist poet and his style was duly affected, getting him beyond the impression of "Solid novelist but…". But also its actual content has a tenderness missing from various earlier novels, such as Life is Elsewhere. Kundera conveys a mother's reaction to an invasion through the perspective of her son and his wife, and then has the son meditate upon it: "Everyone else is thinking about tanks, and you're thinking about pears. Then they moved out, taking the memory of her pettiness with her. But are tanks really more important than pears? As time went by, Karel realized that the answer to this question was not as obvious as he had always thought, and he began to feel a secret sympathy for Mama's perspective, which had a big pear tree in the foreground and somewhere in the distance a tank no bigger than a ladybug, ready at any moment to fly out of sight. (Part 2, section 3, paragraph break removed)" This book is essential for Kundera I feel, faced with unimpressed or even exasperated readers. Anyway, let's go back to the book as ethnic minority fiction and think about Kundera's fate in multiculturalism. Let's introduce some theorists too! John Rawls's greatest book is surely A Theory of Justice, but he also has his book Political Liberalism, which some people write a lot about but it is a puzzle to me: its basic idea seems commonplace and the elaboration of it seems poorly thought out, moreover caked in jargon. Modern liberal democracies have citizens profoundly divided by religious beliefs, moral beliefs, and what they think a good life consists in: how are they going to live together with these differences in *comprehensive doctrine*? "Well, they have to share some common values, isn't it? Or the society will fall apart. Or most of them do anyway. The ones who do not are potentially a problem!" almost anyone in such a society would say, if they can be bothered saying these things, with fewer qualifications perhaps. (Is Rawls's book a bizarre lesson in economics? Once you have written a classic, this is what you can get away with it? O loneliness of being a classic; O even greater loneliness of being a classic after the age of classics. Must write some stupid quotes on the unlikely chance a literary executor appears! Well, Rawls develops the idea in a way others would not: see next sentence.) Rawls thinks that the constitution of a liberal society should be justifiable to citizens, but not to all citizens, only to citizens who subscribe to liberal tenets, whom he confusingly calls *reasonable citizens* instead of simply liberal citizens. ("You gotta have some jargon, dude!" A philosopher this economic? Does Amartya Sen actually vomit?) There are also likely to be some *unreasonable citizens*, the usual examples being religious fundamentalists and fascists. If there are too many, action must be taken. Reasonable citizens believe that society should be organized as a fair system of social cooperation and allow for disagreements over various religious and moral matters. Rawls's vision in his books conflicts with that of Michael Sandel. Sandel thinks that people cannot be expected to be fair to whoever, in line with Rawlsian liberal values, because their attachments to such things as family and national tradition make them who they are. (The self is not prior to ends, in his jargon.) A reader examining the debate is likely to think: you have to set up the constitution along the lines Rawls recommends, because the alternative is social breakdown, but Sandel captures what people are really like, so work departments and residential areas even are likely to reflect divides: all people of this religion here and that religion there, or all people of this ethnic group here and that ethnic group there. An unpleasant synthesis of the two Harvard men, and maybe not a good idea at all! Well, not everywhere is like that, I hope. But I have seen formations sort-of like that. The more Sandel is right, the more Kundera is likely to be dependent on his The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, despite the contemporary fame of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. "Who is this Kundera guy? He is not an author from my people. I will give him a small chance and he had best be always good." One thinks, "He is not Toni Morrison, he is not Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, he is not…" (Not one of the speaker's people!) Another thinks, "He is not Salman Rushie, he is not Hanif Kureishi, he is not…" (Not one of the speaker's people!) A third thinks, "He is not Margaret Atwood, he is not Alice Munro, he is not…" Etc. Or whoever the next generation are. Even if we set aside Sandel, a good question is whether a society in which social justice is the official value will prefer fiction in which authors continuously prove themselves, with very flashy fiction. "It is fairer then: you do that and you get in; you don't do that and you are dependent on promotion by a supportive community probably, to ensure readers keep reading, and where did you get that from?" An article by Taiye Selasi is entitled "Where to start with: Milan Kundera." Underneath the title, she writes, "The Czech writer didn't only leave us The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he wrote a series of playful, philosophical books examining relationships, sex and mortality." She recommends different books for readers with different preferences and describes The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as the sexiest one! (I suspect Kundera unfiltered is sadistic.) But when it comes to the section of her article "If you only read one…" she recommends the massively more famous The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Well, if you try to recommend anything else there, it is probably going to take over the whole piece because you will have to dislodge the expected recommendation, by argument, or else you will have to devote a lot of mental energy into how to avoid this task. But I personally am placing my bets differently. References Arshi, Mona. 2021. Somebody Loves You. Sheffield: And Other Stories. ("Everything worth saying can be written on your fingernail or on the seam of an unshelled almond." Ruby from this book.) Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2022. Ethnic minority fiction and Milan Kundera's assessment of the taxi driver. Available on PhilPapers at: https://philarchive.org/archive/EDWEMFv2 Kundera, Milan. 1984 (translated from Czech by M.H. Heim). The Joke. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. Kundera, Milan. (translated from Czech by Peter Kussi). 1986. Life is Elsewhere. London: Faber and Faber. Kundera, Milan. 1996 (translated from French by Aaron Asher). The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. London: Faber and Faber. "Okay, we get it. This one is your favourite," you say? It is a prediction, isn't it? Who doesn't like a prediction?! Kundera, Milan. (translated from Czech by Michael Henry Heim.) 1984. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. London: Faber and Faber. Macaulay, Rose. 1923. Told by an idiot. New York: Boni and Liveright. Available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/75677/pg75677-images.html Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Sandel, Michael. 1984. The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self. Political Theory 12(1): 81-96. Available at: https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/SandelProceduralRepublicUnencumberedSelf1984.pdf Riding, Laura. 1936. Progress of Stories. Mallorca: Seizin Press. Available at: https://archive.org/details/progressofstorie0000ridi Selasi, Taiye. 2024. Where to start with: Milan Kundera. The Guardian 9th July 2024: https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/09/where-to-start-with-milan-kundera