“Kundera is an academic, an elitist, a scholar somewhat trapped in 20th century Europe, but he is still right.”

Kundera’s collection of essays and talks looks at the novel form as both a constructed object and as a threatened artifact in our cultural history. In both goals he is hugely insightful and panoramic in his views, though somewhat locked into the mid-20th century.

To begin there, Kundera demonstrates his deep scholarship into the history of the culture-building power of the novel across most of the book, though he seems to suggest that it has (in the hands of writers like Kafka and Broch, and perhaps himself) reached its pinnacle. Now it is a threatened art form which alone demonstrates the capacity of human thought. The novel as all art has always changed, but for Kundera, it must cease to do so at this point. In this sense, he remains the “grumpy old man” I have sensed in my other reviews of his non-fiction work. More importantly for many readers, Kundera is as likely to make a dramatic pronouncement about his subjects with no support or elaboration whatsoever, so unless we are readers of some academic breadth in his field, we are unlikely to follow how he assembles his points.

That said, I still found the book a wonderful and refreshing read. To demonstrate the fullness of the art form, Kundera examines several works at some length and with an eye that is too rare for critical theory: instead of merely naming themes, he examines their nuance at length and how they emerge from tone and structure, and then he goes further to place them in the larger social milieu to test their veracity. His lengthy look at Broch’s <i>The Sleepwalkers,</i> a novel few have perhaps read, nevertheless reveals a structural pattern that opens up humanity’s necessity to examine its moments of crisis. In other words, Kundera shows us how the artistic bones of fiction, when thoughtfully rendered, themselves support the finest ideas.

This discussion of structure in writing as necessity for its art powers the discussions on the craft of authors. So many writers talk about the worklife of composition (their daily schedules, their workloads, their idea creation) or–if we are lucky–the style points of writing (King’s <i>On Writing</i> prominent here). Few look to structure, or if they do–from Aristotle to Wharton to Campbell–they do so from a readerly perspective of classification. Kundera is the first writer I have found who looks deeply at the “artistic act,” the conception of form upon which the other elements are built.

And this approach alone sets the novel as art apart from the novel as entertainment or distraction. So many writers are content to “tell a good yarn” and can conceive of nothing beyond the plot but a topical theme. Kundera is an academic, an elitist, a scholar somewhat trapped in 20th century Europe, but he is still right.