The Art of the Novel

by Milan Kundera Narrated by Graeme Malcolm

Overview

“Incites us to reflect on fiction and philosophy, knowledge and truth, and brilliantly illustrates the art of the essay.” - The New Republic

""Every novelist's work contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel, an idea of what the novel is. I have tried to express the idea of the novel that is inherent in my own novels."" - Milan Kundera

Kundera brilliantly examines the evolution, construction, and essence of the novel as an art form through the lens of his own work and through the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Musil, Kafka, and perhaps the least known of all the great novelists of our time, Hermann Broch.

Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the post-psychological novel.

Milan Kundera explores the role of historical events in fiction and the creation of character in the post-psychological novel, providing valuable insights for aspiring writers.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A novelist who writes eloquently about the wrenching dislocations of history, Kundera explains that his fictions use historical circumstances only to thrust his characters into a ``revelatory existential situation.'' The Czech writer (The Joke, Laughable Loves) draws lessons from Cervantes, who saw the world as a welter of contradictory truths, and from Kafka, who recognized that pure irrationality held center stage. In essays and dialogues, he discusses novelists whose works are sorely neglected (Broch, Diderot) and more familiar writers like Tolstoy, Flaubert, Musil and Sterne. He presents a 62-word glossary of key words to aid readers of his own novels (``Betrayal . . . Breaking ranks and going off into the unknown''). His strikingly original reflections crystallize his conviction that the modern novelist's greatest asset is the wisdom of uncertainty. (March)

Library Journal

Kundera's first nonfiction book alternates between passionately intelligent reflections on some of the novelists most important to himCervantes, Broch, and Kafkaand on his own challenging and important work. Although the Czech author's own fiction better proves his argument that the novel is far from dead (where there is no censorship), this book is very useful for understanding his works as continuing a Central European and international tradition. He is so dedicated to his art form that he evaluates contemporary culture on the basis of how well it supports the modern novel. The reader is left with a renewed appreciation of the form. For all literature collections.Ethan Bumas, formerly with the New Sch. for Social Research, New York

From the Publisher

Lucid, detached, and epigrammatic …The book has its author’s familiar swiftness and variety of attack and his elegant, provocative irony.” — The New Yorker

“Incites us to reflect on fiction and philosophy, knowledge and truth, and brilliantly illustrates the art of the essay.” — The New Republic

“Highly readable, provocative, and of inspirational force.” — Anthony Burgess

“Kundera writes with wisdom and force.” — The Village Voice

“Refreshing, unorthodox, valuable. Incandescent illumination by one of literature’s most important voices.” — Kirkus Reviews

The New Yorker

Lucid, detached, and epigrammatic …The book has its author’s familiar swiftness and variety of attack and his elegant, provocative irony.

Anthony Burgess

Highly readable, provocative, and of inspirational force.

The Village Voice

Kundera writes with wisdom and force.

The New Republic

Incites us to reflect on fiction and philosophy, knowledge and truth, and brilliantly illustrates the art of the essay.

The New Yorker

Lucid, detached, and epigrammatic …The book has its author’s familiar swiftness and variety of attack and his elegant, provocative irony.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173541550
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/25/2012
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Part One

The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes

In 1935, three years before his death, Edmund Husserl gave his celebrated lectures in Vienna and Prague on the crisis of European humanity. For Husserl, the adjective "European" meant the spiritual identity that extends beyond geographical Europe (to America, for instance) and that was born with ancient Greek philosophy. In his view, this philosophy, for the first time in history, apprehended the world (the world as a whole) as a question to be answered. It interrogated the world not in order to satisfy this or that practical need but because "the passion to know had seized mankind."

The crisis Husserl spoke of seemed to him so profound that he wondered whether Europe was still able to survive it. The roots of the crisis lay for him at the beginning of the Modern Era, in Galileo and Descartes, in the one-sided nature of the European sciences, which reduced the world to a mere object of technical and mechanical investigation and put the concrete world of life, die Lebenswelt as he called it, beyond their horizon.

The rise of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of the specialized disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Husserl's pupil Heidegger called, in a beautiful and almost magical phrase, "the forgetting of being."

Once elevated by Descartes to "master and proprietor of, nature," man has now become a mere thing to the forces (of technology, of politics, of history) that bypass him, surpass him, possess him. To those forces, man's concrete being, his "world oflife" (die Lebenswelt), has neither value nor interest: it is eclipsed, forgotten from the start.

The Art ofthe Novel. Copyright © by Milan Kundera. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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