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Original Essays | September 23, 2009

Jonathan Lethem: IMG Stops: On Those Things My New Novel Forgot to Be About, Maybe



For me, there's a weird, unfathomable gulf — I almost wrote gulp — between the completion of a novel and its publication. Some days this duration feels interminable, as though the book has... Continue »
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The Art of the Novel (Perennial Classic)

by Milan Kundera

The Art of the Novel (Perennial Classic) Cover

ISBN13: 9780060093747
ISBN10: 0060093749
Condition: Standard
All Product Details

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Every novelist's work contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel, an idea of what the novel is. I have tried to express here the idea of the novel that is inherent in my own novels.<BR> — Milan Kundera 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.

Book News Annotation:

The noted author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1982) collects seven essays written between 1979 and 1985 on his conception of the novel. Kundera's themes range from Cervantes as the forgotten founder of the Modern Era, to the roles of novelists vs. philosophers. The first Perennial Library edition appeared in 1988; originally published in French in 1986 as L'Art du roman by Éditions Gallimard.
Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Synopsis:

Kundera examines the evolution, construction, and essence of the novel as an art form through the lens of his own work and through the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Musil, Kafka, and perhaps the least known of all the great novelists of our time, Hermann Broch.

Refreshing, unorthodox, elegant, and lucid, The Art of the Novel illuminates the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, the creation of character in the postpsychological novel and his reflections on the state of the modern European novel.

About the Author

The Franco-Czech novelist 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, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves—all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.

What Our Readers Are Saying

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megcampbell3, January 12, 2008 (view all comments by megcampbell3)
This short read was akin to taking a master class in writing and reading, the classroom dialogue replaced by the intensity of listening closely to the book. Milan Kundera's vision of his own writing, its construction (story, theme; motif) and its context in European history, means as much to the art of the novel in Europe as it does to the art of the novel world-wide, as well as to the writers who continue to nurture a fictional landscape that begins way back and extends far beyond the page. Unexpectedly, deeply thought-provoking.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780060093747
Translator:
Asher, Linda
Publisher:
Harper Perennial
Translator:
Asher, Linda
Author:
Kundera, Milan
Author:
by Milan Kundera
Subject:
General
Subject:
Semiotics & Theory
Subject:
Composition & Creative Writing - General
Subject:
General Literary Criticism & Collections
Subject:
Fiction -- History and criticism.
Subject:
Fiction -- Technique.
Edition Description:
Paperback
Series:
Perennial Classic
Publication Date:
April 2003
Binding:
Paperback
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Pages:
176
Dimensions:
822x528x47 31

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