Life Is Elsewhere (Czech: Život je jinde) is a Czech-language novel by Milan Kundera finished in 1969.

Jaromil is a precocious child; at five, he says things like "Life is like weeds", which his Mama takes to be very profound and pins to the walls of their house.

She learns her husband had had an affair with a Jewish woman, who was taken to Theresienstadt during the war; he had attempted to rescue his mistress, and had died in the process.

He uses his poetry to woo a redhead girl he had met at a market checkout counter, and reconnects with the janitor's son, who has become a policeman, and invites Jaromil to read at a symposium of well-known party poets.

Jaromil catches a cold, attends a party, gets insulted, starts an argument, and ends up locked outside in the freezing night.

Suddenly I had the idea of including a story that takes place three years after the hero’s death—in other words, outside the time frame of the novel," said Kundera.

"[3] The name "Life Is Elsewhere" is taken from a line in Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, in the section "The Foolish Virgin", which says: "He was very nearly a child… His mysterious ways seduced me.

[5] Reviewing the book in the New York Times in 1974, Paul Theroux described Kundera as "a magnificent short‐story writer and reasonably good novelist".

[6] In a postnote to the French edition, François Ricard wrote, "Along with Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, Life Is Elsewhere is perhaps the harshest work ever written against poetry.