After battling with Faulkner, I wanted to actually read something, and so I returned to Kundera, who's fallen out of favor a bit in recent years, but whose style and erudition has always impressed me.
I'd wanted to read The Art of the Novel for a number of years, and had the good fortune to do so last week. For me, Kundera's book reads as a lament for Europe. True, it's about the novel and its evolution. But it's really about what it is to be European, and what it is to consider oneself a European writer.
Kundera released The Art of the Novel before the advent of the European Union - and before, for that matter, the collapse both of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. He was writing at a time when what it was to be European - particularly Central European - was not proscribed by laws or regulations. It was a time when Europe - for Kundera, at least - represented a shared cultural space.
It's funny because for all of Kundera's intellect, parts of this collection border on naive (or, to be more generous, hopeful). Kundera imagines Europe as the center of the world's cultural evolution - and he places Central Europe at the heart of it all. For him, the Continent is united in its appreciation for modernity, in its question to overcome the nightmare captured by Kafka.
And it's not that I necessarily disagree with that sentiment: it's more that, today, in 2014, Europe feels as fragmented as it ever has - this despite the emergence of the European Union and other international agencies designed to leverage that shared European spirit. I'm not certain there is a collective past for the "citizens" of Europe, though, like Kundera, I'd like to think there is. (And when I do, I begin to feel more like a mystic than a realist.)
The Art of the Novel is a fast read, a rewarding tour of Kundera's approach to writing and creativity. I still maintain that his three great novels - Laughter and Forgetting, Unbearable Lightness, and The Joke - stand up to anything written over the past 60 years. And that's because Kundera is a master of the situational: his characters are empty vessels designed to react to absurdity, to situations that induce laughter, whether appropriate or otherwise. Were Kundera to write another novel today, I could imagine his characters responding with tragic laughter to the slow disintegration of the land he loves: Europe.
The last word is for Kundera:
"...Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors."
"...Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors." Yes! But, as our post-post-modern culture continues to evolve (or deteriorate), I wonder if we will still have "great readers" for the great novels of the past. And I have misgivings about the possibility of "great novels" in the future. Perhaps I am being too pessimistic. In any case, I enjoyed your posting about Kundera's book, and I am provoked: now I must read it!
ReplyDeleteI completely agree about the state of the novel - as well as the reader. Your comments reminds me of the long piece Will Self published in The Guardian earlier this spring (link below). In it, he laments our condition, one in which great novels seems out of place, out of sync. He wonders whether literary novels will become a specialist's craft, and whether the readers of these novels will themselves become specialists. I'm concerned that he's exposed the truth...Thanks for your response to my post, RT. Always appreciate your enthusiasm and insights.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/will-self-novel-dead-literary-fiction
Oddly found this post after reading the above article after it was discussed on a Facebook thread which I responded to with a quote from Kundera's, 'Art of The Novel.'
ReplyDeleteLast laugh is Kundera's...surely he will not to be forgotten.