The Art of the Novel: Amazon.ca: Milan Kundera: Books

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In, 1935, there years before his death, Edmund Husserl gave his celebrated lectures in Vienna and Prague on the crisis of European humanity. Read the first page

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover

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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews

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4.8 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)

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4.0 out of 5 stars Kundera's Art, Oct 8 2003

By

Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Art Of The Novel (Paperback)

This relatively small book (165 pages) offers an engaging peek into the mind of a brilliant novelist and scholar. Consisting of interviews, speeches, and published work, Kundera expounds on his literary beliefs about what makes a great novel. My favorite sections are the interviews because of their immediacy and accessibility, although the author's most profound insights arise from his discussion of other authors: Kafka, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Flaubert, and others.

Writers, students of literature, and Kundera's faithful readers should find much to think about in these pages. This is not a light discourse on how to write a novel; Kundera takes his art seriously, in both deeply instinctive and scholarly ways. Those looking for a how-to book would be well-served to look elsewhere.

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5.0 out of 5 stars The unbearable being of a novel, July 15 2002

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R. Tiedemann "Sunnye" (Bellevue, NE USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Art Of The Novel Rev Ed (Paperback)

Milan Kundera is a Czechoslavakian writer who lives in France. He's written a number of novels, among the THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING and THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING. In this, his first nonfiction effort, Kundera relates the concept of the novel to his own work. The first two essays were inspired by an interview he gave to The Paris Review on his practical experiences with the art of the novel.

His focus goes beyond his own work, however. Kundera presents some rather intense and unusual analyses of his personal favorite writers: Cervantes, Rabelais, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Kafka, to name just a few.

This is a book for the scholarly reader; the reader who knows literature. It is one that illuminates all sorts of possibilities for writing the novel, for Kundera points out the the novel can express life in ways that can't be achieved by any other form.

He moves from the general to the specific -- from the form of the novel, to the way others have used it, to his own work. Particularly interesting is his dictionary of 63 key words which he says are essential to understanding his fiction. His observations about the state of contemporary Russian literature -- what is being published and why -- are fascinating. He also expresses his frustration, as an author, with translators of his works and how they handle language.

"The art of reading," wrote Andre Maurois, "is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with a book." Readers will come away from this with a better understand of the novel as an expression of life as well as deeper insight into a number of classical works.

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5.0 out of 5 stars His Best?, Nov 4 2001

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Kim F. Hill (Rockford, IL. United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Art Of The Novel Rev Ed (Paperback)

Well it so hard to pick a favorite Kundrea book because they are all so Brilliant, but I might pick this one.

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