Hot on the heels of Cormac McCarthy's demise comes the death of Czech novelist Milan Kundera. Long-standing consumers of my ghoulish authorial-death-related output may remember that, while I feel it's slightly beyond the pale to keep some sort of official Dead Pool list of who I think might be next, I have nevertheless speculated on the subject in the past to the extent of offering up a list of authors whose books have featured on the list, are alive, and are quite old, in a not wishing ill on anyone but Just Saying sort of way, and that Kundera's name has featured, and no wonder as I think he is (or was) the oldest living author on the list.
Kundera featured here twice, in 2008 and 2016 with The Unbearable Lightness Of Being and The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting respectively. Those are probably his two best-known books, the first being made into a film in the 1980s. The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is probably the one to go for, but he had a substantial body of other work that I haven't read.
Anyway, here's the updated list. You might remember that when Alison Lurie died a couple of years back I confidently announced that she was the oldest curse victim at the age of 95. I'm not sure why I did this, because the obituary I linked to specifically says she was 94, and so she was. I'll leave the original post as-is as a monument to my carelessness, but I've corrected her age in the table here. The reason this is relevant (other than a general desire for accuracy) is that Kundera was also 94, as was Doris Lessing when she died back in 2013. So who was oldest? Well, I can reveal that I've done the maths, or, rather, got Excel to do the maths for me, and the result is that Kundera was older than Lurie by a mere 9 days, with Lessing a comparative spring chicken at 74 days younger.
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