The Czech writer Milan Kundera, b. Apr. 1, 1929, has lived in France since 1975, persuaded to self-exile by the censoring or suppression of his work by the government of his native country. Kundera has long denied any political motivation in his writings, however. His work is always humorous, skeptical, and fundamentally pessimistic in describing the universal human condition, whether under Communism or elsewhere. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979; Eng. trans., 1980) is his most celebrated novel. Other highly regarded works include The Joke (1967; Eng. trans., 1982); Laughable Loves, a collection of short stories originally published in the 1960s (Eng. trans., 1974); Life Is Elsewhere (1969; Eng. trans., 1974); and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984; Eng. trans., 1984). In The Art of the Novel (1988), a collection of essays, Kundera repeats his conviction that the novel must be "autonomous," created independent of any system of political belief.