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Encounter Milan Kundera 9780061894411 Books

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Encounter Milan Kundera 9780061894411 Books

kundera’s style reminds me of the work of montaigne, the man who contemplated and developed his opinions of what interested him into what, thanks to him, has become known as the essay. to begin with a thought, to jot down an insight while it’s fresh, there’s a rawness about that, ripeness is not always all. with their kafkaesque sensibility and more accessible than nietzsche’s aphorisms, kundera’s brief pieces do share such company.

born in czechoslovakia, as a writer kundera experienced his country invaded by the soviets in 1968, a shock to the western world who watched the advent of some of the new art scene in 1964 at the world’s fair in new york at the czechoslovakian pavilion. a published novelist, kundera settled in exile in france in 1975 where he continues to write. he purports to be a french writer writing of czech experiences. the thought central to his essays is the encounter of two cultures to form an identity or solidarity.

in discussing the right of writers to choose their own forms, here are some of the authors, novels and observations subject of his essays: the spirit of the odd novel by rabelais is more meaningful in translation to czech readers than to contemporary french readers; the anti-novel, written by carlos fuentes and curzio malaparte, which kundera champions as the arch-novel; an insightful placing the fiction of philip roth, who continues to remind the press he is an american novelist who writes of jews and not a jewish novelist, within the literary history of sex and love in the novel; aime cesaire and other martinique born artists and the important encounter which occurred between them and the artists of the french surrealist movement; and of laughter, the different forms of laughter in a work by dostoievski and the right of the artist to depict laughter in a work under a harsh regime. other writings highlight musicians, beethoven, schoenberg, and xenakis, among them, and a psychological observation of a painting by francis bacon with a reflection of an incident told by kundera of an encounter with a friend, a woman, interrogated in czechoslovakia.

his devotion to the freedom of the artist and defense of artistic form outside traditionally accepted notions of what a novel, in general, is expected to be, plot driven with characters engaged, is best expressed in his description of modernism as he refers to the novels by malaparte: ‘…there are many great novels that, at their birth, are unlike the commonly held idea of the novel. And so? Isn’t a great novel great precisely because it does not repeat what already existed? … And I find it significant that everything about THE SKIN’S form that seems to contradict the very idea of the novel should also reflect the new climate in the aesthetic of the novel as it took shape in the twentieth century, in contrast to its norms in the century before. For instance: all the great modern novelists had a somewhat distant relation to story in a novel, no longer considering it to be the indispensable basis for ensuring unity in a work. So the striking feature of THE SKIN’s form is that the composition does not rely on a story, on any causal sequence of actions.’

through his essays, kundera offers an overview of authors of fiction who have treated the novel as novel, and tells us of places where the reception of works by those with power can destroy what does not meet their approval, and silence, imprison, exile and kill the artists.


Tags : Encounter [Milan Kundera] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Encounter is the latest addition to the acclaimed body of literary criticism from beloved author Milan Kundera (<em>The Unbearable Lightness of Being</em>,Milan Kundera,Encounter,Harper,0061894419,General,Literature, Modern;20th century;History and criticism.,Music;History and criticism.,Painting;Appreciation.,20th century,Appreciation,Biography,Czech Republic,Essays,General Adult,History and criticism,KUNDERA, MILAN - PROSE & CRITICISM,LITERARY CRITICISM General,Literary Criticism,Literature - Classics Criticism,Literature, Modern,Music,Non-Fiction,Painting,United States

Encounter Milan Kundera 9780061894411 Books Reviews

In this collection of short essays, Milan Kundera shares reflections on a number of topics and writers, artists and composers from Francis Bacon, Philip Roth and Juan Goytisolo to Beethoven, Carlos Fuentes, Oscar Milosz and Curzio Malaparte, to name several. However, a reader need not be familiar with these artists and writers to benefit from the many wisdom nuggets sprinkled throughout the book’s 180 pages. As a way of sharing some of Kundera’s wisdom and insights, here are a number of quotes from the text along with my modest comments

“The painter’s gaze comes down on the face like a brutal hand trying to seize hold of her essence, of that diamond hidden in the depths. Of course we are not certain that the depths really do conceal something – but in any case we each have in us that brutal gesture, that hand movement that roughs up another person’s face in hopes of finding, in it and behind it, something that is hidden there.” ---------- Kundera goes on to question to what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person. Actually, I myself take a different approach I attempt to seize the hidden true essence of a person not by any brutal gesture but by remaining completely still and listening. Usually quite a unique experience for people – to be permitted the space to be heard. Much different than someone taking their words as a means to insert their own opinions and views.

“The acceleration of history has profoundly transformed individual lives that, in centuries past, used to proceed from birth to death within a single historical period; today a life straddles two such periods, sometimes more. Whereas history used to advance far more slowly that human life, nowadays it is history that moves fast, it tears ahead, it slips from a man’s grasp, and the continuity, the identity of a life is in danger of cracking apart.” ---------- I myself have lived through a few phases of history. Turns out, I love our current international community where we can speak to one another across the globe instantly. As for the pre-internet, pre-Goodreads world where people were cut off from one another and had to filter their reflections and experiences through conventional publishers – good riddance! There is one aspect of life I have absolute no use for – nostalgia. My sense is people who rely on nostalgia are asleep to the present, deserving of good whack on the back to wake up to their current life.

“Scarcely 1% of the world’s population are childless, but at least 50% of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced. . . . All Stendhal’s protagonists are childless, as are many of Balzac’s; and Dostoyevsky’s and in the century just past, Marcel, the narrator of “In Search of Last Time,” and of course all of Musil’s major characters.” ---------- I suspect the various authors wanted their novel’s characters set free to reflect and act in interesting and unusual ways so as to further propel their story. None of those mundane tasks of changing dippers, attending their kid’s organized sports and dealing with their kid’s desires and wants – how conventional, unexceptional and boring!

“The funeral cortege that followed Anatole France to his grave was several kilometers long. Then everything changed. Aroused by his death, four young Surrealist poets wrote a pamphlet against him.” ---------- As Kundera explains, the surrealists desired a world of pure imagination and poetry, a world of painting of dreams and improbable visions; none of that irony, skepticism and seasoned wisdom at the very core of a novel. Matter of fact, they dismissed the novel as a prime form of artistic expression.

“When I was a young man, trying to find my way in a world sliding toward the abyss of a dictatorship whose reality no one had foreseen, desired, imagined, especially not the people who had desired and celebrated its arrival, the only book that managed to tell me anything lucid about the unknown world was Anatole France’s “The Gods Are Thirsty.” ---------- I love how Kundera found refuge in a novel during his own personal time of crisis, during a bleak episode in his country’s history. A novel can be a second world for us during our own times of crisis, a time when the outer, material, day-to-day world appears hostile, even sinister.

“In the novels of Anatole France humor is constantly present (though always subtle); in another book, La Rôtisserie de la reine Pédauque, one can’t help enjoying it, but what’s humor doing on the bloody terrain of one of the worst tragedies in history? Yet that is exactly what is unique, fresh, admirable the skill to resist the nearly obligatory pathos of so somber a subject. For only a sense of humor can discern the humorlessness in others.” ---------- I recall how Kierkegaard said that people who lack a sense of humor become an object of humor themselves. Actually, the longer I live, the less seriously I take all those very serious people I encounter - people who are entirely serious strike me as complete dullards.

“This explains why “The Gods Are Thirsty” has always been better understood outside France than within it. For such is the fate of any novel whose action is too tightly bound to a narrow historical period fellow citizens automatically look for a document of what they themselves experienced or passionately debated; they look to see if the novel’s image of history matches their own; they try to work out the author’s political stances, impatient to judge them. The surest way to spoil a novel.” ---------- Isn’t it curious how many authors find their true audience on the other side of the globe? As an American, I am always pleasantly surprised when I read praise and perceptive observations about American authors (authors I have no particular love for myself) such as John Steinbeck or Ernest Hemingway from readers in such places as India and Japan.

“I say “I love Joseph Conrad.” And my friend says, “Me, not so much.” But are we talking about the same writer? I’ve read two Conrad novels, he just one, and it’s one I don’t know. And yet each of us, in all innocence (in all innocent impertinence), is sure he has an accurate idea of Conrad.” ---------- I enjoy Kundera admitting how he takes his own reading of a famous author as accurate, yet on deeper reflection, acknowledging how his reading and understanding is limited and relatively superficial.

Xenakis does not stand against some earlier phase of music; he turns away from all of European music, from the whole of its legacy. He locates his starting point somewhere else not in the artificial sound of a note separated from nature in order to express a human subjectivity, but in the noise of the world, in a “mass of sound” that does not rise from inside the heart but instead comes to us from the outside, like the fall of the rain, the racket of a factory, or the shouts of a mob.” ---------- Kundera notes how Xenakis’s face and body were deformed as the consequence of the horrors of war, a deformation that left a permanent record of the insanity of much of world culture on his body, propelling the composer to look elsewhere than tradition for musical inspiration.

In the 1960s Vera Linhartova was one of the most admired writers in Czechoslovakia, the poetess of a prose that was meditative, hermetic, beyond category. . . . Linhartova “My sympathies lie with the nomads, I haven’t the soul of a sedentary myself. So I am now entitled to say that my own exile has fulfilled what was always my dearest wish to live elsewhere.” When Linhartova writes in French is she still a Czech writer? No. Does she become a French writer? No, not that either. She is elsewhere.” ---------- Thus is exile in our post-modern world. I suspect many who are reading these words consider themselves exiles. I myself do not watch TV or read newspapers or listen to pop music, do not go to movies or support a sports team, do not drink or smoke, do not drive a car or seek out gossip, thus, in a very real sense, I am an exile to the country and society I have lived in all of my life. Ah, the postmodern world!
Milan Kundera continues his penetrating cultural commentaries with ENCOUNTER. The only drawback for this American is Kundera's focus on less well-known European writers and history.
I love Kundera's fiction, but did not realize this book is more of an art analysis so I was dissapointed.
No one, no one, no one knows more about the novel than Kundera. Maybe this isn't up to the lofty standards of Art of the Novel but it's well worth your time. You know, Kundera might just be one of the world's smartest, most observant people... someone whose writing in impeccable... whose analysis of contemporary times and the role the novel plays in showing us our lives is brilliant.
Wonderful followup to "The Curtain". Rich in it's examination of the novel, but also moves into painting, music, and poetry.

Mainly a defense of writing as art, especially with the examination of Malaparte and contrasting his work to Sartre's quote "Prose is in essence utilitarian...the writer is a speaker he designates, demonstrates, orders, rejects, questions, entreats, insults, persuades, insinuates."

Both in Malaparte's excerpts and Kundera's explanations, we find that writing can move far beyond utilitarian, in his last paragraph

The war's closing moments bring out a truth that is both fundamental and banal, both eternal and disregarded compared to the living, the dead have an overwhelming numerical superiority, not just the dead of this war's end but all the dead of all times, the dead of the past, the dead of the future; confident in their superiority, they mock us, they mock this little island of time we line in, this tiny time of the new Europe, they force us to grasp all its insignificance, all it's transience...
kundera’s style reminds me of the work of montaigne, the man who contemplated and developed his opinions of what interested him into what, thanks to him, has become known as the essay. to begin with a thought, to jot down an insight while it’s fresh, there’s a rawness about that, ripeness is not always all. with their kafkaesque sensibility and more accessible than nietzsche’s aphorisms, kundera’s brief pieces do share such company.

born in czechoslovakia, as a writer kundera experienced his country invaded by the soviets in 1968, a shock to the western world who watched the advent of some of the new art scene in 1964 at the world’s fair in new york at the czechoslovakian pavilion. a published novelist, kundera settled in exile in france in 1975 where he continues to write. he purports to be a french writer writing of czech experiences. the thought central to his essays is the encounter of two cultures to form an identity or solidarity.

in discussing the right of writers to choose their own forms, here are some of the authors, novels and observations subject of his essays the spirit of the odd novel by rabelais is more meaningful in translation to czech readers than to contemporary french readers; the anti-novel, written by carlos fuentes and curzio malaparte, which kundera champions as the arch-novel; an insightful placing the fiction of philip roth, who continues to remind the press he is an american novelist who writes of jews and not a jewish novelist, within the literary history of sex and love in the novel; aime cesaire and other martinique born artists and the important encounter which occurred between them and the artists of the french surrealist movement; and of laughter, the different forms of laughter in a work by dostoievski and the right of the artist to depict laughter in a work under a harsh regime. other writings highlight musicians, beethoven, schoenberg, and xenakis, among them, and a psychological observation of a painting by francis bacon with a reflection of an incident told by kundera of an encounter with a friend, a woman, interrogated in czechoslovakia.

his devotion to the freedom of the artist and defense of artistic form outside traditionally accepted notions of what a novel, in general, is expected to be, plot driven with characters engaged, is best expressed in his description of modernism as he refers to the novels by malaparte ‘…there are many great novels that, at their birth, are unlike the commonly held idea of the novel. And so? Isn’t a great novel great precisely because it does not repeat what already existed? … And I find it significant that everything about THE SKIN’S form that seems to contradict the very idea of the novel should also reflect the new climate in the aesthetic of the novel as it took shape in the twentieth century, in contrast to its norms in the century before. For instance all the great modern novelists had a somewhat distant relation to story in a novel, no longer considering it to be the indispensable basis for ensuring unity in a work. So the striking feature of THE SKIN’s form is that the composition does not rely on a story, on any causal sequence of actions.’

through his essays, kundera offers an overview of authors of fiction who have treated the novel as novel, and tells us of places where the reception of works by those with power can destroy what does not meet their approval, and silence, imprison, exile and kill the artists.