The Art of the Novel

Milan Kundera

Harper Collins, Apr 1, 2003 - Literary Criticism - 176 pages

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.

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LibraryThing Review

User Review  - kant1066 - LibraryThing

This book has the property of timelessness, much like the "writing on writing" that is seen in Eric Auerbach and Kenneth Burke. However, it is in no way literary theory, nor is it, contrary to what ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Jargoneer - LibraryThing

Collection of essays and interviews about Kundera's, and other, novels. These seven pieces (itself a nod to Kundera's repeated use of seven sections in his novels) consist of two interviews, an ...

About the author

The Franco-Czech novelist and critic Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves—all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Art of the Novel; Perennial Classics
• Author: Milan Kundera
• Edition: reprint, revised, large print
• Publisher: Harper Collins, 2003
• ISBN: 0060093749, 9780060093747
• Length: 176 pages
• Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / Composition & Creative Writing; Language Arts & Disciplines / General; Literary Criticism / General