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Title: The Art of the Novel
Author: Milan Kundera
Narrator: Graeme Malcolm
Format: Unabridged
Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
Language: English
Release date: 06-20-13
Publisher: Canongate Faber
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 1 votes
Genres: Classics, World Literature
Publisher's Summary:
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.
Critic Reviews:
"Lucid, detached, and epigrammatic ...The book has its author's familiar swiftness and variety of attack and his elegant, provocative irony." (The New Yorker)
Members Reviews:
Basically fan service, probably not the first work of Kundera to check out.
Kundera has this crazy breadth of interests and themes that span his works, as well as a love for historic details. Not being a scholar of European History I've always felt a little bit overwhelmed by some of his extended digressions on Goethe or the particulars of Central European cultural and political trends. Despite literally placing himself into some of the works it seems extremely hard to pin down "his" views via his Novels.
This one is exactly what I was looking for, a candid, open take on what he was hoping to accomplish with his body of work - from the particulars of his use of the number 7 to an explanation on reading 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting' correctly. Would totally recommend for fans of Kundera, but if you're a spoilers person he goes over the plots of Immortality, TBLF, Unbearable Lightness of Being, and a few others in detail.
Great way to Understand the Novel
Kundera, is clear and direct with his explanations of the Novel. It's not useful to explain his explanation. Your time is well spent on this short book experiencing Kundera's use of his own work and the work of others to reveal the power and importance of the Novel to the progressive growth of western civilization. Care is necessary with this claim. Novels contain personal actualization and social justice philosophy, and both fail in outside the Novel.
A Lost View of the Novel
This is a good and insightful book. Because each chapter was written under different circumstances some may find it disjointed, but their is an underlying understanding of the novel that is coherent and profound. Kundera goes all the way back to Cervantes and show us how novelists have perceived and influenced the world down to our time. We pick up some central European novelists, like Hermann Bosch's trilogy, The Sleepwalkers, scandalously unknown in this country. Kundera shows us how novels occupy a role in culture were nothing else can go. A book well worth reading.
I'm happy to recommend it (she's already made some $$ with ...
A gift for my daughter, an aspiring writer; I trust her judgment, if she asked for it, I'm happy to recommend it (she's already made some $$ with her writing, so that's perhaps a useful fact.
Five Stars
Beautiful reflections on writing and life.
