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The Art of the Novel (Perennial Classics) by…
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The Art of the Novel (Perennial Classics) (original 1986; edition 2003)

by Milan Kundera (Author)

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1,6382310,669 (3.76)16
Kundera in his article Kafka's World (1988) drawn from his book “Art of the Novel” (1986) says the difference between Dostoyevsky and Kafka is that in Dostoyevsky the offence seeks out punishment (Raskonikov) but in Kafka punishment seeks out the offence.

Kundera sees Kafka's imaginary, oneiric writings as one manifestation of the growth of bureaucracies and depersonalization and totalitarianism as another, prosaic, material manifestation of the same thing. He does not think Kafka was predictive of totalitarianism, but was writing about the same things which made totalitarianism possible, only Kafka saw them already in the microcosm of the family and the office as well as the state. A human being becomes identified with his/her file which in the bureaucrat's world is more important than the person. This causes the person to no longer be able to understand the bureaucracy which seems like an endless maze, which it is since the bureaucracy itself has no central unity, it is just endless process.

Kundera, a Czech exiled and writing before the fall of communism, really brings some interesting personal and local color to Kafka. He says the Party Headquarters in Prague was called the Castle and the second in command was nicknamed Klamm, which is from the Czech word 'klam' meaning 'fraud, illusion' which is what Klamm is in The Castle. Kundera has several examples of stories and anecdotes that illustrate the Kafkaesque, (which is translated from the French kafkaien as Kafkan). I have written that I don't think Kafka has much of the Orwellian totalitarian state, but Kundera makes very good arguments to show it does in fact. I rather believe he is right. ( )
  antao | Aug 24, 2020 |
English (20)  French (2)  Dutch (1)  All languages (23)
Showing 20 of 20
Kundera in his article Kafka's World (1988) drawn from his book “Art of the Novel” (1986) says the difference between Dostoyevsky and Kafka is that in Dostoyevsky the offence seeks out punishment (Raskonikov) but in Kafka punishment seeks out the offence.

Kundera sees Kafka's imaginary, oneiric writings as one manifestation of the growth of bureaucracies and depersonalization and totalitarianism as another, prosaic, material manifestation of the same thing. He does not think Kafka was predictive of totalitarianism, but was writing about the same things which made totalitarianism possible, only Kafka saw them already in the microcosm of the family and the office as well as the state. A human being becomes identified with his/her file which in the bureaucrat's world is more important than the person. This causes the person to no longer be able to understand the bureaucracy which seems like an endless maze, which it is since the bureaucracy itself has no central unity, it is just endless process.

Kundera, a Czech exiled and writing before the fall of communism, really brings some interesting personal and local color to Kafka. He says the Party Headquarters in Prague was called the Castle and the second in command was nicknamed Klamm, which is from the Czech word 'klam' meaning 'fraud, illusion' which is what Klamm is in The Castle. Kundera has several examples of stories and anecdotes that illustrate the Kafkaesque, (which is translated from the French kafkaien as Kafkan). I have written that I don't think Kafka has much of the Orwellian totalitarian state, but Kundera makes very good arguments to show it does in fact. I rather believe he is right. ( )
  antao | Aug 24, 2020 |
Few intresting thoughts and ideas. This compilation of essays talks about Kundera's own work, analayzing it style and content. Also couple of chapters I've quick-read because it's basically studies on Kafka and Broch.
If you're looking for writing advice - that's probably not the first place you're want to look. As a study on literature through time and space - it's fascinating. ( )
  Alevis | May 17, 2020 |
What a wonderful day it has been. Cool and sunny, the weather welcomes with only a slim wink of menace behind such. I awoke early and after watching City i went and joined some friends for smoked wheat beer and colorful conversations about public vomiting and the peasant revolts during the Reformation. Oh and there was a parade. I didn't pay much attention to that.

Returning home I watched Arsenal's triumph and enjoyed the weather and picked up this witty distillation. Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind had engendered this recent interest in essays, especially those concerning the history of the novel. I bought the volume in Camden when we went to London in 2004. I truly bought it for my wife but it certainly fit my own present situation. Kundera weaves together an intriguing portrait of modernity. He also sidesteps the English literary tradition aside from a handful of nods to Fielding and Sterne. Such is fine.

Thinking about my own influences, I remain intrigued that Nietzsche remains so fixed and central and Kafka has slinked to the dark margins. Perhaps Hrabal (that usurper) took his place in my murky mindpool.
( )
  jonfaith | Feb 22, 2019 |


NOVEL. The great prose form in which an author thoroughly explores, by means of experimental selves (characters), some great themes of existence.

LETTERS. They are getting smaller and smaller in books these days. I imagine the death of literature; bit by bit, without anyone noticing, the type shrinks until it becomes utterly invisible.

The above two quotes convey the richness and creamy depth along with the playfulness a reader will encounter in this book by one of the giants of modern literature, Czech-born Milan Kundera. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t imagine a collection of essays containing more gems of wisdom on each and every page. And since Mr. Kundera consistently composes his works in a seven part structure to accord with his own artistic, literary and musical sensibilities, I think it only fair that I list seven quotes, one from each of his seven parts, and make my modest comments accordingly.

Part One – The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes
“To take, with Cervantes, the world as ambiguity, to be obliged to face not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths (truths embodied in imaginary selves called characters), to have as one’s only certainty the wisdom of uncertainty, requires no less courage.” ---------- I recall a lecturer on The Platonic Tradition accusing non-Platonists of being nihilistic skeptics and relativists for denying there is a truth as well as thinking how even if there was a truth it couldn’t be known, and even if it could be known, it couldn’t be communicated. Contrary to this accusation, Mr. Kundera outlines with flair and in some detail how the wisdom of the novel transcends the overly simplified binary categories of good/evil, either/or, black/white in dogmatic discourse.

Part Two – Dialogue on the Art of the Novel
“I’m too fearful of the professors for whom art is only a derivative of philosophical and theoretical trends. The novel dealt with the unconscious before Freud, the class struggle before Marx, it practiced phenomenology (the investigation of the essence of human situations) before the phenomenologists.” ---------- Mr. Kundera underscores how his novels and the great novels of other writers are not philosophy per se; rather, any ideas or philosophy arises from the specific existential situation of characters.

Part Three – Notes Inspired by “The Sleepwalkers
“The world is the process of disintegration of values (values handed down from the Middle Ages), a process that stretches over the four centuries of the Modern Era and is their very essence.” ---------- This is a most intriguing section where the author analyzes the historical and cultural context of the various possibilities of freedom we face and how novelist Hermann Broch outlines three such possibilities in his great work.

Part Four – Dialogue on the Art of Composition
“Let me return to the comparison between the novel and music. A part is a movement. The chapters are measures. These measures may be short or long or quite variable in length. Which brings me to the issue of tempo. Each of the parts in my novels could carry a musical indication: moderato, presto, adagio, and so on.” ---------- We are told how the author was drawn more to music than to literature up to the age of twenty-five. Much of this section delves into some detail in comparing the structure of music with the structures of his novels, enough philosophic material here to keep both musicians and non-musicians ruminating for quite some time.

Part Five – Somewhere Behind
“There are periods of modern history when life resembles the novels of Kafka.” ---------- The author relates some of his own experience and stories living in Prague under a totalitarian regime. One story is about a mother of a one-year old baby boy who was unjustly imprisoned by the government. Years go by and the mother is released from prison. Then, some years after her release, the author visits the mother in her apartment. He watches as the mother dissolves in tears, waling and heaving, upset at her now twenty-five-year-old son over some minor matter like oversleeping. The author watches all this in shock; he see how the mother has taken the place of the totalitarian state and the son, like many of Kafka’s characters, accepts his guilt.

Part Six – Sixty-three Words
“IDEAS. My disgust for those who reduce a work to its ideas. My revulsion at being dragged into what they call “discussions of ideas.” My despair at this era befogged with ideas and indifferent to works.” ---------- At another point in the section, he says how novelists who think they are larger than their novels should get another job. Love his frankness!

Part Seven – Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe
“No peace is possible between the novelist and the agelaste. Never having heard God’s laughter, the agelasts are convinced the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are.” ---------- The agelaste is a man or woman who does not laugh, who has no sense of humor. You know the type – and they hate literary novels like the ones written by Milan Kundera. ( )
  Glenn_Russell | Nov 13, 2018 |
"Mentre Dio andava lentamente abbandonando il posto da cui aveva diretto l'universo e il suo ordine di valori, separato il bene dal male e dato un senso a ogni cosa, Don Chisciotte uscì di casa e non fu più in grado di riconoscere il mondo. Questo, in assenza del Giudice supremo, appare all'improvviso una terribile ambiguità; l'unica Verità divina si scompose in centinaia di verità relative, che gli uomini si spartirono tra loro. Nacque così il mondo dei Tempi moderni, e con esso il romanzo, sua immagine e modello".

Ecco, il nostro romanzo è una cavalcata nell'ambiguità ma senza possedere la "sola certezza" cioè "la saggezza dell'incertezza" che "richiede una forza altrettanto grande". Oggi tutti possiedono un monte di certezze che farebbero rabbrividire Cartesio, nel suo splendido libro Kundera ci ricorda che "l'uomo sogna un mondo in cui il bene e il male siano nettamente distinguibili, e questo perché, innato e indomabile, esiste in lui il desiderio di giudicare prima di aver capito. Su questo desiderio sono fondate le religioni e le ideologie". Perfetto. Il problema del nostro tempo, accelerato dall'accesso ai mass media e dalla chat sul nulla ("ciao, come stai?"), fu riassunto in maniera lapidaria da Ennio Flaiano così: "Oggi il cretino è pieno di idee". È questa la crisi della democrazia, la sua naturale involuzione: il cretino oggi ha non sole le idee, si trova nella sala comando e clicca pulsanti che non sa cosa provocano. (cit. Mario Sechi - LIST - 25 settembre 2017) ( )
  AntonioGallo | Nov 2, 2017 |
"Mentre Dio andava lentamente abbandonando il posto da cui aveva diretto l'universo e il suo ordine di valori, separato il bene dal male e dato un senso a ogni cosa, Don Chisciotte uscì di casa e non fu più in grado di riconoscere il mondo. Questo, in assenza del Giudice supremo, appare all'improvviso una terribile ambiguità; l'unica Verità divina si scompose in centinaia di verità relative, che gli uomini si spartirono tra loro. Nacque così il mondo dei Tempi moderni, e con esso il romanzo, sua immagine e modello".

Ecco, il nostro romanzo è una cavalcata nell'ambiguità ma senza possedere la "sola certezza" cioè "la saggezza dell'incertezza" che "richiede una forza altrettanto grande". Oggi tutti possiedono un monte di certezze che farebbero rabbrividire Cartesio, nel suo splendido libro Kundera ci ricorda che "l'uomo sogna un mondo in cui il bene e il male siano nettamente distinguibili, e questo perché, innato e indomabile, esiste in lui il desiderio di giudicare prima di aver capito. Su questo desiderio sono fondate le religioni e le ideologie". Perfetto. Il problema del nostro tempo, accelerato dall'accesso ai mass media e dalla chat sul nulla ("ciao, come stai?"), fu riassunto in maniera lapidaria da Ennio Flaiano così: "Oggi il cretino è pieno di idee". È questa la crisi della democrazia, la sua naturale involuzione: il cretino oggi ha non sole le idee, si trova nella sala comando e clicca pulsanti che non sa cosa provocano. (cit. Mario Sechi - LIST - 25 settembre 2017) ( )
  AntonioGallo | Nov 2, 2017 |

NOVEL. The great prose form in which an author thoroughly explores, by means of experimental selves (characters), some great themes of existence.

LETTERS. They are getting smaller and smaller in books these days. I imagine the death of literature; bit by bit, without anyone noticing, the type shrinks until it becomes utterly invisible.

The above two quotes convey the richness and creamy depth along with the playfulness a reader will encounter in this book by one of the giants of modern literature, Czech-born Milan Kundera. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t imagine a collection of essays containing more gems of wisdom on each and every page. And since Mr. Kundera consistently composes his works in a 7 part structure to accord with his own artistic, literary and musical sensibilities, I think it only fair that I list seven quotes, one from each of his seven parts, and make my modest comments accordingly.

Part One – The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes
“To take, with Cervantes, the world as ambiguity, to be obliged to face not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths (truths embodied in imaginary selves called characters), to have as one’s only certainty the wisdom of uncertainty, requires no less courage.” ---------- I recall a lecturer on The Platonic Tradition accusing non-Platonists of being nihilistic skeptics and relativists for denying there is a truth as well as thinking how even if there was a truth it couldn’t be known, and even if it could be known, it couldn’t be communicated. Contrary to this accusation, Mr. Kundera outlines with flair and in some detail how the wisdom of the novel transcends the overly simplified binary categories of good/evil, either/or, black/white in dogmatic discourse.

Part Two – Dialogue on the Art of the Novel
“I’m too fearful of the professors for whom art is only a derivative of philosophical and theoretical trends. The novel dealt with the unconscious before Freud, the class struggle before Marx, it practiced phenomenology (the investigation of the essence of human situations) before the phenomenologists.” ---------- Mr. Kundera underscores how his novels and the great novels of other writers are not philosophy per se; rather, any ideas or philosophy arises from the specific existential situation of characters.

Part Three – Notes Inspired by “The Sleepwalkers
“The world is the process of disintegration of values (values handed down from the Middle Ages), a process that stretches over the four centuries of the Modern Era and is their very essence.” ---------- This is a most intriguing section where the author analyzes the historical and cultural context of the various possibilities of freedom we face and how novelist Hermann Broch outlines three such possibilities in his great work.

Part Four – Dialogue on the Art of Composition
“Let me return to the comparison between the novel and music. A part is a movement. The chapters are measures. These measures may be short or long or quite variable in length. Which brings me to the issue of tempo. Each of the parts in my novels could carry a musical indication: moderato, presto, adagio, and so on.” ---------- We are told how the author was drawn more to music than to literature up to the age of 25. Much of this section delves into some detail in comparing the structure of music with the structures of his novels, enough philosophic material here to keep both musicians and non-musicians ruminating for quite some time.

Part Five – Somewhere Behind
“There are periods of modern history when life resembles the novels of Kafka.” ---------- The author relates some of his own experience and stories living in Prague under a totalitarian regime. One story is about a mother of a one-year old baby boy who was unjustly imprisoned by the government. Years go by and the mother is released from prison. Then, some years after her release, the author visits the mother in her apartment. He watches as the mother dissolves in tears, waling and heaving, upset at her now 25 year-old son over some minor matter like oversleeping. The author watches all this in shock; he see how the mother has taken the place of the totalitarian state and the son, like many of Kafka’s characters, accepts his guilt.

Part Six – Sixty-three Words
“IDEAS. My disgust for those who reduce a work to its ideas. My revulsion at being dragged into what they call “discussions of ideas.” My despair at this era befogged with ideas and indifferent to works.” ---------- At another point in the section, he says how novelists who think they are larger than their novels should get another job. Love his frankness!

Part Seven – Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe
“No peace is possible between the novelist and the agelaste. Never having heard God’s laughter, the agelasts are convinced the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are.” ---------- The agelaste is a man or woman who does not laugh, who has no sense of humor. You know the type – and they hate literary novels like the ones written by Milan Kundera.
( )
  GlennRussell | Feb 16, 2017 |
I struggled a little through the first half or so because of my unfamiliarity with a lot of the novels, novelists, and musical concepts under discussion, but I powered through and was rewarded for my efforts. ( )
  StefanieBrookTrout | Feb 4, 2017 |
Interessante bespiegelingen van de auteur over de kunst van de roman. Hij heeft een broertje dood aan boeken met een moreel oordeel, die volgens hem aan werkelijkheidsreductie lijden (zoals 1984) en geeft de voorkeur aan auteurs met een grenzeloze fantasie die nieuwe werkelijkheden ontdekken en de roman nieuwe wegen doen inslaan (zoals Cervantes, Rabelais, Kafka, Joyce en Proust). ( )
1 vote joucy | Jul 3, 2013 |
Kundera is always worth reading. And this book is no exception. The emphasis on the formal aspects of fiction in ''The Art of the Novel'' is a principle for Kundera that is accompanied by an overt disavowal of any political agenda. A second principle is derived from the first, and it is the rejection of kitsch. Not simply bad or laughable art, kitsch is, in Kundera's definition from ''Sixty-three Words'' (his dictionary of the terms and categories that organize his imagination), ''the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one's own reflection.'' One antidote to kitsch is to write novels according to Kundera's third principle - what he refers to throughout ''The Art of the Novel'' as ''novelistic counterpoint'' or ''polyphony.'' ''Counterpoint,'' or ''polyphony,'' is, strictly speaking, the play among different kinds of writing - essay, dream, narrative - in a single text. One can see examples of these principles in Kundera's own novels, but he uses examples from Cervantes to Kafka, Joyce, and Broch to make his case. ( )
  jwhenderson | Aug 13, 2012 |
This is a compendium of seven pieces that Kundera states "were written, published, or spoken before an audience between 1979 and 1985." "The sole raison d'ètre of a novel," he quotes Hermann Broch, "is to discover what only the novel can discover." Just having completed the first draft of my first completed novel (my drawers are lined with half-finished attempts), I eagerly read in anticipation of discovering the rules of writing The Great Novel. Not surprisingly, the rules are vague and sketchy. One of Kundera's favorite rule-breaking devices is something I am fond of—the rabbit trail, a blatant detour from the action of the story so that the author can indulge an itch to explore some political or psychological or spiritual thought that came to mind while a character is brushing his teeth or walking to work or making love. Kundera does not just discuss his own work and what motivates him, but delves also into comparative literature commentary. He looks at Cervantes, Flaubert, Rabelais, Sterne, and Diderot, among others. Kundera's mini course in the history and structure of the novel is engrossing, illuminating and thought-provoking—worth reading a few more times. (March 2009) ( )
  bookcrazed | Jan 20, 2012 |
This book has the property of timelessness, much like the "writing on writing" that is seen in Eric Auerbach and Kenneth Burke. However, it is in no way literary theory, nor is it, contrary to what some of the other reviewers seem to believe, "philosophical." It is a careful explication of the author's principles, not a grand theoretical schema. The instantiation of real human circumstances, ones deeply concerned with the problems entailed by Heidegger's in-der-Welt-sein, is what differentiates the novel from philosophy. It is nothing less and nothing more than a series of seven disquisitions on the historical development of the European novel.

"The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes," serves to offer the substance for latter explication, meditation, and the occasional tangent. Its subject is the history and development of the European novel that is deeply rooted in existential concern. As Kundera says, "A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral." He is careful to delineate the novel's uniqueness as a historical artifact, and sees modernity as closely tied to the regnant existential themes as those explored by Joyce, Kafka, Sterne, Gombrowitz, and Broch (a somewhat epigrammatic essay on The Sleepwalkers is contained herein). But Kundera sees the inaugural journey into modernity as one that is essentially Cervantes'. Don Quixote enters a world that has seen the weakening influence of religious dogmatism. His experience contains none of the certitude of categorical absolutes that were so indicative of earlier existence (again, that desideratum for novelists). ( )
  kant1066 | Oct 14, 2011 |
Collection of essays and interviews about Kundera's, and other, novels.

These seven pieces (itself a nod to Kundera's repeated use of seven sections in his novels) consist of two interviews, an address on winning an award, three essays, and a dictionary, with meanings, of 63 words (which came about due to Kundera spending more time supervising translations of his novels rather than writing).

The first essay, The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes, is an impassioned defence of the Western novel from Cervantes on. ("Indeed, for me, the founder of the Modern Era is not only Descartes but also Cervantes." - "The novel is Europe's creation; its discoveries, though made in various languages, belong to the whole of Europe.". All writers in essence defend the novel (or poetry) that they himself write - hence Kundera's idea of the European novel is derived form Sterne, Kafka, Hasek, et al.
The time was past when man had only the monster of his own soul to grapple with, the peaceful time of Joyce and Proust. In the novels of Kafka, Hasek, Musil, Broch, the monster comes from outside and is called History; it no longer has anything to do with the train the adventurers used to ride; it is impersonal, uncontrollable, incalculable, incomprehensible—and it is inescapable.

He believes that it took a wrong turn and rejected many of its possibilities when it got tied down in the 19th century to realism and then psychology. The pivot of this change is Flaubert, this is an idea also developed by the critic James Wood, although Wood hasn't pinned it down so insightfully -
The lost infinity of the outside world is replaced by the infinity of the soul. The great illusion of the irreplaceable uniqueness of the individual—one of Europe's finest illusions—blossoms forth.

The novel then found its true modern form in the writers listed above (plus a few others like Gombrowicz); writers from Central Europe that found a new ways to approach it.
As is inevitable, this essay also becomes about the death of the novel, especially in the light of totalitarianism -
Thus the death of the novel is not just a fanciful idea. It has already happened. And we now know how the novel dies: it's not that it disappears; it falls away from its history. Its death occurs quietly, unnoticed, and no one is outraged.

For Kundera there are four main appeals to the continuation of the novel -
1. Play (Sterne)
2. Dream (Kafka)
3. Thought (Broch or Musil)
4. Time ("Europe looking back on its own past, weighing up its history like an old man seeing his whole life in a single moment")

What is immediately apparent about this list is how much it resembles a breakdown of Kundera's approach to the novel - his novels are not one of description (his characters are rarely described) or psychology (his characters are rarely given any backstory) but ones that play with form, essays ('thought') mix with fiction, etc.
In the end Kundera is worried that the novel is against the flow of the modern world -
I merely believe I know that the novel cannot live in peace with the spirit of our time: if it is to go on discovering the undiscovered, to go on "progressing" as novel, it can do so only against the progress of the world.

In essence all the themes of the book are raised in this first essay, the subsequent sections returning to the same ideas, exploring them from different angles and persepectives (the one weakness of the book, especially if read continuously is this repetition - paradoxically, this also gives the book the strength of a single continuous argument). The one place it temporarily breaks from this argument is when Kundera discusses, very interestingly, the influence of music on his novels (he is musically trained and before turning to words wrote 'classical' music).
It is still full of thought-provoking stuff , from Dialogue on the Art of the Novel:
Joyce analyzes something still more ungraspable than Proust's "lost time": the present moment. There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable, than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact.

or
A character is not a simulation of a living being. It is an imaginary being. An experimental self. In that way the novel reconnects with its beginnings. Don Quixote is practically unthinkable as a living being. And yet, in our memory, what character is more alive? Understand me, I don't mean to scorn the reader and his desire, as naive as it is legitimate, to be carried away by the novel's imaginary world and to confuse it occasionally with reality. But I don't see that the technique of psychological realism is indispensable for that.

From Somewhere Behind
In the Kafkan world, the file takes on the role of a Platonic idea. It represents true reality, whereas man's physical existence is only a shadow cast on the screen of illusion. Indeed, both the Land-Surveyor K. and the Prague engineer are but the shadows of their file cards; and they are even much less than that: they are the shadows of a mistake in the file, shadows without even the right to exist as shadows.

From Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe (and suitably the last words in the book)
if European culture seems under threat today, if the threat from within and without hangs over what is most precious about it—its respect for the individual, for his original thought, and for his right to an inviolable private life—then, I believe, that precious essence of the European spirit is being held safe as in a treasure chest inside the history of the novel, the wisdom of the novel. It is that wisdom of the novel I wanted to honor in this speech of thanks. But it is time for me to stop. I was forgetting that God laughs when he sees me thinking.


This is one of the best books I have read about the novel but I also realise that could be down to the fact I like the type of novels that Kundera is championing. It is therefore possible another reader could find Kundera completely wrong-headed, missing the point, the strengths, of the traditional novel. I doubt any reader, unless it is one who doesn't want to 'think' while reading, is going to be disappointed by this book. It will make you think about the novel anew. ( )
1 vote Jargoneer | Apr 12, 2011 |
I now have a new appreciation of Milan Kundera's work - even though I already appreciated it a great deal anyway. This excellent collection of essays on the art of writing and being a writer gives a true insight into the creative act, without preaching a particular way of writing. I wish I was a good enough writer to be able to obey: the use of the novel is in doing what only a novel can do; yet so many of my short stories are trivial and do nothing in the search for enlightenment and the challenge to examine what has previously been unexamined. ( )
1 vote soylentgreen23 | Oct 14, 2010 |
One can always count on Milan Kundera to reinvigorate our desire to tackle the classics in literature. In these seven related essays he reacquaints us with some of the giants of the novels and inspires us to rethink our relationships to their narratives. ( )
  zenosbooks | Feb 24, 2009 |
An interesting history of the novel, with considerations of crucial works in the genre. ( )
  Chamelline | Oct 8, 2008 |
The essential book for novelists and fiction writers from an international master. ( )
  sungene | Oct 29, 2007 |
Much more descriptive (of Kundera's own fiction) than prescriptive, this remains an essential work in the Kunderan canon. I particularly enjoyed the "glossary" chapter which not only helps to outline major themes that run through his works but also echoes the "dictionary of misunderstood words" bits in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Oh, to have my estranged copy returned to me! ( )
  dreamingtereza | Apr 3, 2006 |
This is a great book for anyone working to be a serious novelist. I like Kundera's approach though because he lets you know why it's important to be serious about writing. He knows from experience that everything you work for can be taken away in a moment. ( )
  clothingoptional | Feb 26, 2006 |
It must have been a while since I was in college, because I can't understand a word Kundera is saying. Luckily his novels are not this dense.
  acheekymonkey | Nov 13, 2005 |
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