Encounter »

Milan Kundera's study of philosophy is evident in his books, which are part meditation, part love story and part satire. In novels such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he asks readers to consider not just his characters, but questions of history and human existence.

A brilliant new contribution to Kundera's ongoing reflections on art and artists, written with unparalleled insight, authority, and range of reference and allusion

Milan Kundera's new collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his novels, Kundera revisits the artists who remain important to him and whose works help us better understand the world we live in and what it means to be human. An astute reader of fiction, Kundera brings his extraordinary critical gifts to bear on the paintings of Francis Bacon, the music of Leos Janacek, and the films of Federico Fellini, as well as the novels of Philip Roth, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Gabriel GarcÍa MÁrquez, among others. He also takes up the challenge of restoring to its rightful place the work of Anatole France and Curzio Malaparte, major writers who have fallen into obscurity.

Milan Kundera's signature themes of memory and forgetting, the experience of exile, and the championing of modernist art are here, along with more personal reflections and stories. Encounter is a work of great humanism. Art is what we possess in the face of evil and the darker side of human nature. Elegant, startlingly original, and provocative, Encounter follows in the footsteps of Kundera's earlier essay collections, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, and The Curtain.

The New York Times - John Simon

Short as Encounter is, it accom-plishes much…Linda Asher's apt translation makes for fluent reading…I can't imagine reading this book without being challenged and instructed, amused, amazed and aroused, and ultimately -delighted.

I The Painter's Brutal Gesture: On Francis Bacon 1

II Novels, Existential Soundings 17

The Comical Absence of the Comical (Dostoyeusky: The Idiot) 19

Death and the Fuss (Louis-Ferdinand Celine: From Castle to Castle) 22

Love in Accelerating Histroy (Philip Roth: The Professor of Desire) 25

The Secret of the Ages of Life (Gudbergur Bergsson: The Swan) 28

The Idyll, the Daughter of Horror (Marek Bienczyk: Tworki) 32

The Debacle of Memories (Juan Goytisolo: The Curtain Falls) 35

The Novel and Procreation (Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude) 38

III Blacklists, or Divertimento in Homage to Anatole France 41

IV The Dream of Total Heritage 61

A Dialogue on Rabelais and the Misomusists 63

The Dream of Total Heritage in Beethoven 68

The Arch-Novel: An Open Letter for the Birthday of Carlos Fuentes 71

The Total Rejection of Heritage, or Iannis Xenakis (a text published in 1980, with two interventions from 2008) 74

V Beautiful Like a Multiple Encounter 81

VI Elsewhere 101

Exile as Liberation According to Vera Linhartova 103

The Untouchable Solitude of a Foreigner (Oscar Milosz) 106

Enmity and Friendship 110

Faithful to Rabelais and to the Surrealists Who Delved into Dreams 115

On the Two Great Springs, and on the Skvorecky's 117

From Beneath You'll Breathe the Roses (The Last Visit with Ernest Breleur) 122

VII My First Love 125

The Long Race of a One-Legged Runner 127

The Most Nostalgic Opera 133

VIII Forgetting Schoenberg 143

No Celebration (a text published in 1995 in the Frankfurter Rundschau together with other pieces celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the birth of cinema) 145

What Will Be Left of You, Bertolt? 148

Forgetting Schoenberg 151

IX The Skin: Malaparte's Arch-Novel 155