The Art of the Novel

by Kundera, Milan

• ISBN13: 9780060093747
• ISBN10: 0060093749
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-02-08
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

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 here the idea of the novel that is inherent in my own novels. -- Milan Kundera Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. 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.

Author Biography

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France for more than twenty years. He is the author of the novels The Joke. Life Is Elsewhere. The Farewell Party. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the shortstory collection Laughable Loves -- all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his non-fiction works, The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.

Table of Contents

The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes	p. 3
Dialogue on the Art of the Novel	p. 23
Notes Inspired by "The Sleepwalkers"	p. 47
Dialogue on the Art of Composition	p. 71
Somewhere Behind	p. 99
Sixty-three Words	p. 121
Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe	p. 157
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