Testaments Betrayed by Milan Kundera is an essay written like a novel, shedding light along the way on some of the great questions of our time.
Milan Kundera, born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, was a student when the Czech Communist regime was established in 1948, and later worked as a labourer, jazz musician and professor at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Prague. After the Russian invasion in August 1968, his books were proscribed. In 1975, he and his wife settled in France, and in 1981, he became a French citizen. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and of the short-story collection Laughable Loves - all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity and Ignorance, as well as his non-fiction works The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.
In this stimulating, free-form essay, Czech novelist Kundera (The Art of the Novel) traces the evolution of the novel from Rabelais to Kafka and draws parallels between literature and music as he shuttles effortlessly among Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Chopin, Thomas Mann, Bach and André Breton. The betrayals implied by the title include conductor Ernest Ansermet's rejection of the music of his erstwhile friend Igor Stravinsky; the halfhearted support for Salman Rushdie by intellectuals who misconstrued his Satanic Verses as an attack on religious faith; and Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers's ``kitsch-making'' interpretations, which, in Kundera's view, confuse Hemingway's life with his fiction. Another alleged ``testament betrayed'' involves Max Brod, Kafka's friend and literary executor, accused here of promoting an image of Kafka as saintly martyr. Because of Brod, Kundera argues, Kafka's works tend to be read either as autobiographical or as religious allegories instead of as ``the real world transformed by an immense imagination.'' First serial to the New York Review of Books. (Sept.)
"Great works can only be born within the history of their art and as participants in that history," states noted Czech novelist Kundera at the opening of this work. What follows, however, is not a history or even a straightforward analysis of the art of fiction. Rather, Kundera skims along gracefully as a skater, touching several high points-in music and philosophy as much as literature-in a wholly original discussion of how fiction functions and how it is implicated in the fabric of Western culture. Throughout, he is concerned with the moral dimension of literature, though not as a tool of instruction. He condemns the small-mindedness that would put a novel to work for some agenda, inevitably turning it into kitsch. Instead, he sees the novel as moral precisely because it is "a realm where moral judgment is suspended," allowing for the free play of ideas. Plenty of wonderful ideas play freely here. Recommended for all literary collections.-Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal''
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