Encounter - Hardcover

Kundera, Milan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061894419 ISBN 13: 9780061894411

Publisher: Harper, 2010

Synopsis

Encounter is the latest addition to the acclaimed body of literary criticism from beloved author Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). Novelist Russell Banks writes, “Not since Henry James, perhaps, has a fiction writer examined the process of writing with such insight, authority, and range of reference and allusion.” In Encounter, Kundera brilliantly reflects on some of his signature themes and old loves (Rabelais, Fellini, Janacek, Malaparte), on literature, on morality, and on the transformation of civilization as we know it.

About this title

About the Author

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929–2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975 until his death. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves—all originally in Czech. His more recent novels, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance, and The Festival of Insignificance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.

From the Back Cover

A brilliant new contribution to Kundera's ongoing reflections on art and artists, written with unparalleled insight, authority, and range of reference and allusion

Milan Kundera's new collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his novels, Kundera revisits the artists who remain important to him and whose works help us better understand the world we live in and what it means to be human. An astute reader of fiction, Kundera brings his extraordinary critical gifts to bear on the paintings of Francis Bacon, the music of Leos Janacek, and the films of Federico Fellini, as well as the novels of Philip Roth, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Gabriel García Márquez, among others. He also takes up the challenge of restoring to its rightful place the work of Anatole France and Curzio Malaparte, major writers who have fallen into obscurity.

Milan Kundera's signature themes of memory and forgetting, the experience of exile, and the championing of modernist art are here, along with more personal reflections and stories. Encounter is a work of great humanism. Art is what we possess in the face of evil and the darker side of human nature. Elegant, startlingly original, and provocative, Encounter follows in the footsteps of Kundera's earlier essay collections, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, and The Curtain.

Reviews

Originally published as Une rencontre in France, Kundera’s home since leaving Czechoslovakia in 1975, this collection of brief essays explores his relationship with art (especially modern art) and mortality (to some extent, his own). Though his subjects include Fellini, Schoenberg, and painter Francis Bacon, much of what Kundera has to say has to do with the novel and the successes and shortcomings of certain novelists; in this way, this selection echoes The Art of the Novel (1986). But his musings on Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Anatole France, and Curzio Malaparte (and others, like Dostoyevsky and Phillip Roth, more familiar to American audiences) occasionally take a wistful turn, and in describing the artists whose work he has loved, his guard seems to come down a bit. A meditation on the French-speaking Caribbean island of Martinique includes a description of the moon that aches with reverence for its beauty but also for its neglect by people who no longer look up at the sky. Perceptive and intimate, this selection will be appreciated by Kundera’s many admirers and of interest to fans of European literature in general. --Brendan Driscoll

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0061894419
• ISBN 13: 9780061894411
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192