Review by New York Times Review
THE Czech novelist Milan Kundera's new essayistic book, "Encounter," his fourth, is alternatingly elegiac and celebratory. An émigré from the Communist horror of what was then Czechoslovakia, he settled in Paris and proceeded to write in French. But he discovered in France "the sense that we have come to the era of post-art, in a world where art is dying because the need for art, the sensitivity and the love for it, is dying." Still, there remain the particular artists whom Kundera celebrates - novelists, poets, composers, painters - who keep beauty alive. There are 26 essays, some of only a couple of pages, some rather longer. Let us examine a characteristic one, "What Will Be Left of You, Bertolt?" It begins by making reference to a 1999 article in a Paris weekly, "one of the more serious ones." (Frequently Kundera will refer to a person or a piece of writing without identification, unclear whether for universalizing or diplomatic reasons.) It contained a special section on 18 "geniuses of the century," featuring, among others, Coco Chanel, Maria Callas, Bill Gates, Le Corbusier, Picasso, Yves Saint Laurent and the little-known astronomy professor Robert Noyes. "No novelist," Kundera comments, "no poet, no dramatist; no philosopher; a single architect; a single painter, but two couturiers; no composer, one singer; a single moviemaker (over Eisenstein, Chaplin, Bergman, Fellini, the Paris journalists chose Kubrick)" The selectors were not ignoramuses, Kundera writes. "With great lucidity" they "declared a real change: the new relationship of Europe to literature, to philosophy, to art." Yet the great cultural figures were not forgotten: the period toward the end of the 20th century, Kundera says, produced monographs on Graham Greene, Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Larkin, Brecht, Heidegger, Picasso, Ionesco, E.M. Cioran and others. But the attitude had shifted. Instead of emphasizing works, the monographers concentrated on lives, surface events beneath which they ferreted out the hidden Sin: "Europe was moving into the age of the prosecutors." As a dreadful example, Kundera proffers "a huge 800-page book on Bertolt Brecht," without naming it and its academician author ("Brecht and Company," by John Fuegi). The book exposes "the vileness of Brecht's soul (secret homosexuality, erotomania, exploitation of girlfriends who were the true authors of his plays, pro-Stalin sympathies, tendency to lies, greed, a cold heart)" and "finally in Chapter 45 comes to his body, in particular to its terrible odor, which the professor takes a whole paragraph to describe." Wittily, Kundera continues, "As guarantee of the scholarly nature of this olfactory revelation, in a note to the chapter the writer says he collected 'this detailed description from the woman who was at the time the head of the photo lab of the Berliner Ensemble' . . . whom he interviewed 'on June 5, 1985' (that is, 30 years after the smelly fellow was laid in his coffin)." And he goes on to wonder, "Ah, Bertolt, what will be left of you?" This may be unfair to Fuegi, who rightfully exposed the genuine odiousness of a genius, and it may be generalizing from merely a single instance, but it demonstrates Kundera's satirical skill at raising disturbing questions. One of the major virtues of "Encounter" is the championing of misunderstood, undervalued or forgotten talents. These include Juan Goytisolo, Céline, the composer Iannis Xenakis, Aimé Césaire and other artists of the Antilles (like the painter Ernest Breleur), and the writer Curzio Malaparte, to cite a few. He defends the perceived ugliness in Francis Bacon, comparing him to Samuel Beckett. He praises the politically unsavory Céline for his refusal to make a fuss of anything, even death. In Xenakis's unmelodious music he lauds "beauty washed clean of affective filth, stripped of sentimental barbarity" - in other words, Romanticism, which he equates with kitsch. In Malaparte (a half-German Italian whose real name, Kurt Erich Suckert, he does not mention), Kundera extols the recognition of a new, postwar Europe, "born of an enormous defeat unparalleled in its history," as it became liberated but also occupied by the United States and Russia. In Danilo Kis, the underestimated Serbian-Hungarian Jewish writer, he hails one who "never sacrificed his novels to politics" and, like Kundera, drew inspiration from Rabelais and the neglected Surrealists, such as Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard and Philippe Soupault. There is an ample and well-deserved tribute to the now underappreciated, indeed forgotten, Anatole France, in particular to his antipolitical novel "The Gods Are Thirsty." And this, to the great Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal (best known to Americans for films based on his works, e.g., "Closely Watched Trains"), attacked by a fellow Czech for continuing to publish when colleagues were silenced by the Communists: "A world where a person can read Hrabal is utterly different from a world where his voice could not be heard! One single book by Hrabal does more for people, for their freedom of mind, than all the rest of us with our actions, our gestures, our noisy protests!" And we know whose side Kundera is on in "the disagreement between people for whom the political struggle is more important than real life, than art, than thought, and people for whom the whole meaning of politics is to serve real life, art, thought." KUNDERA comes out in favor of the principle of the nonserious, "one of those possibilities for the art of the novel that lay neglected throughout its history" - or, more precisely, throughout the centuries between Rabelais and Joyce, who, as it were, "rediscovered" him. Kundera is not in favor, however, of the modern antinovel, "with no characters, no plot, no story, if possible no punctuation." But he is in favor, as he writes in an open letter to Carlos Fuentes, of what he calls the "archnovel," which he finds in the works of Hermann Broch ("The Sleepwalkers," "The Death of Virgil"). He also admires, throughout these essays, Kafka and Gombrowicz, among others, and the lightness and irony he finds in Anatole France. He is a lover of paradox. Not the stupid kind he notes in life, where people will remember the murderers of the Jews but not such heroic Jewish achievements as Schoenberg's "Warsaw Survivor," which Kundera declares "the greatest monument music ever dedicated to the Holocaust." Or the benighted paradox of those who celebrate the centenary of the cinema without realizing that "film as art" has lost out to "film as agent of stupidity." No, he loves the artful, illuminating paradox of which he is master, as when he observes in Dostoyevsky "the comical absence of the comical," which allows a fictional character to be welcomed "noisily" into the "world of humorless laughter, where we are condemned to live." Or take the paradox he discovers in a poem by Oscar Milosz, a "nostalgia that is expressed, grammatically, not by the past but by the future: the grammatical future of nostalgia" for "the heartbreaking sorrow of a promise that can never be realized." Kundera has grave doubts about humanity: "Despite the wealth of their lived experiences, people emerge from a historic ordeal still just as stupid as they were when they went into it." In particular, he excoriates blacklists: "We are all at the mercy of blacklists, of their arbitrary, untestable verdicts, and always ready to ape their stupid elegance" - a startling paradox in oxymoronic form. He realizes, not disapprovingly, that "when one artist talks about another, he is always talking (indirectly, in a roundabout way) of himself." So some of his favorite writers are, like him, exiles writing in a language not their own, usually French. He adduces Nabokov and Beckett, but offers tributes to Milosz, a French-language Polish-Lithuanian poet, and the Czech novelist Vera Linhartova, who, self-exiled to France, declares, "The writer is not a prisoner of any one language." According to her, the exile "has often managed to transform his banishment into a liberating launch 'toward another place, an elsewhere, by definition unknown and open to all sorts of possibilities.'" She exemplifies yet another paradox, that people carry on about human rights while deeming the individual to be owned by his nation and its language. Kundera concludes, "We can no longer speak of exile as we have done up till now." Short as "Encounter" is, it accomplishes much, including introducing some of us to such novelists as the Icelander Gudbergur Bergsson, the Pole Marek Bienczyk and the Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau. And he eloquently reintroduces Malaparte, whom many of us have dismissed, as the creator of a new form in "Kaputt" and "The Skin," tantalizingly and suggestively hovering on the cusp between journalism and fiction, and thus producing an important innovation. Perhaps the most charming section of the book is the 15 pages entitled "My First Love" and devoted not to a girl but to the composer Leos Janacek, whom he correctly counterposes to the overemotional Wagner and pronounces brother to the greatest - Bartok, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. He incisively discusses various aspects of Janacek, and concentrates on the opera "The Cunning Little Vixen," whose music and libretto he subjects to revelatory scrutiny. He even manages the difficult task of translating into words Janacek's style: "Dizzyingly tight juxtaposition of highly contrasting themes that follow rapidly one upon another, without transitions and, often, resonating simultaneously; a tension between brutality and tenderness within an extremely short time span. And yet further: a tension between beauty and ugliness, for Janacek may be one of the rare composers who could pose in their music the problem familiar to great painters: ugliness as the subject of an artwork. (In his quartets, for instance, the passages played sul ponticello scrape and grate, and turn a musical sound into noise.)" Linda Asher's apt translation makes for fluent reading. (I only wish she hadn't turned the Forester in "The Cunning Little Vixen" into a "woodsman.") I can't imagine reading this book without being challenged and instructed, amused, amazed and aroused, and ultimately delighted. 'People emerge from a historic ordeal still just as stupid as they were when they went into it.' 'When one artist talks about another, he is always talking . . . of himself.' John Simon is the New York theater critic for Bloomberg News.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 29, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
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.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
These mercurial occasional pieces crackle in their soulful brevity. Kundera's (Immortality) unexpected insights into surrealism (especially the poets), the darkly grotesque, the nonconformist temperament will be familiar to readers immersed in this author's fictions. Although a number of the essays date to the early and mid-1990s, there is a refreshing cohesion to this collection. Of specific interest are chapters comparing Francis Bacon to Samuel Beckett; Kundera's devilish mixing up of Roland Barthes with the dour theologian Karl Barth in a chance conversation; several discussions on the virtues of Rabelais as well as a restoration to prominence of Anatole France, who had been given the French intellectualist bum's rush; a powerful coupling of the bright birth of film with the sad death of Fellini; a scholar's relishing of Bertolt Brecht's body odor; the music of his fellow Czech Leos Janacek. Like the proverbial meal at the Chinese restaurant, the delicious musings of this book are filling at first. Two hours later, one craves more. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A collection of essays, book, music and art reviews, ruminations and recollections by the celebrated Franco-Czech novelist (Ignorance, 2002, etc.).Kundera's mind is an expansive forest, and he visits many trees in these pieces, some more than a dozen years old. In some cases he writes about painters, musicians and novelists whose names and works are widely known (Cline, Philip Roth, Beethoven, Breton). Elsewhere, he expatiates about the creations of artists whose identities are known principally by the cognoscenti, companions and countrymen. The latter include the music of Iannis Xenakis, the paintings of Ernest Breleur and the writings of Danilo Kis. Regardless of the subject, Kundera's prose glows, sometimes in sufficient strength to illuminate even the most obscure of his subjects. The pieces all share a compression of stylehis few words say muchand even some experimentation. In an essay on painter Francis Bacon, for example, he alternates 1995 observations with what he had written initially in 1977. (He employs a similar strategy later in a piece about Xenakis' music.) Kundera writes with passion about what he views as the foolishness of surrendering a friendship to political differences, and he snarls about the deleterious influence of film and television in a piece about the 100th anniversary of the motion picture, which he labels "the principal agent of stupidity" in the world. The author marvels about the Allied occupation forces after World War II, especially the Americans, who seemed so sublimely confident in their divine election and sanction. Continually, he revisits the hopeful Prague spring of 1968 and its hideous aftermath and agrees with Czech writer Vera Linhartova, who wrote how exile can be transformative for an artist. He chides biographers who are enraptured with the sex lives, and even body odors, of their subjects, and he wonders about the artistic portrayal of the ugly.Shows that bright shards of clear prose can serve as windows into the unknown.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
