Book Review - The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera

The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera

London: Faber & Faber, 1990           ISBN 0571142222

I've never read any of Milan Kundera's novels, so it might seem strange that I start my relationship with him with this book. In some ways I'm glad I did, as it gives a great insight into Kundera's view of the role of the novel - particularly in Europe - and what he is trying to do with it.

This book is a compilation of pieces written in other contexts, for other reasons: some have been manipulated to make this work hang together a bit better.

Kundera's theme in this book is to show how the novel developed from Cervantes through to the end of the twentieth century, how the modern world had circumscribed the novel with ideas of realism and notions of the absurd that have come to limit what writers do with the form these days. Kundera, a composer as well as a writer, strongly believes in the connexion between the two arts, and that a book is written much as a sonata or other multi-part opus may have been written.

Kundera's view that the novel is an exploration of the human condition, and as such finds the biographical impulse of critics and so-on repulsive. He is a firm believer of novelists not speaking other than in their novels, and notes with satisfaction that Debussy destroyed all the works he felt he didn't want to leave behind.

The irony is that one of Kundera's favourite novelists is Kafka, who famously told Max Brod to burn his works after he died. The section of this book that deals with Kafka should be required reading by every faculty member who dissects his work. What they do is actually destroy what Kafka was trying to achieve. Kundera, a fellow Czech, who also grew up in a system that Kafka in some ways prefigured, shows a deep understanding of Kafka's understanding of human nature, and of modern life.

He also warns us of the dangers of translation, and why one must be very careful when reading a work not in it's initial language...anecdotes of translators of his works that can't read Czech are both funny and disturbing at the same time.

In  this book, published in 1986, Kundera flags the death of the novel as he knows it, in the rise of mass media and the loss of privacy. Some of his comments are prescient. In an age where it has never been easier to access great literature, it has never mattered less, in academia in particular.

This is a book of parts, but some of the parts are well worth reading.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell