Encounter: Essays

by Milan Kundera

Overview

“I can’t imagine reading this book without being challenged and instructed, amused, amazed and aroused, and ultimately delighted.” —John Simon, New York Times Book Review

Milan Kundera’s brilliant collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and ideas that characterizes his bestselling novels, the internationally acclaimed author revisits the artists whose works help us better understand what it means to be human. Elegant, startlingly original, and provocative, Encounter combines many of the author’s signature themes with personal reflections and stories.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063290761
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/18/2023
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	629,673
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929 - 2023) was born in Brno and 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 later novels, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance, and The Festival of Insignificance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.

Hometown:

Paris, France

Date of Birth:

April 1, 1929

Date of Death:

July 11, 2023

Place of Birth:

Brno, Czechoslovakia

Place of Death:

Paris, France

Education:

Undergraduate degree in philosophy, Charles University, Prague, 1952

Editorial Reviews

Short as Encounter is, it accom­plishes much…Linda Asher's apt translation makes for fluent reading…I can't imagine reading this book without being challenged and instructed, amused, amazed and aroused, and ultimately ­delighted.
—The New York Times

John Simon

These mercurial occasional pieces crackle in their soulful brevity. Kundera's (Immortality) unexpected insights into surrealism (especially the poets), the darkly grotesque, the nonconformist temperament will be familiar to readers immersed in this author's fictions. Although a number of the essays date to the early and mid-1990s, there is a refreshing cohesion to this collection. Of specific interest are chapters comparing Francis Bacon to Samuel Beckett; Kundera's devilish mixing up of Roland Barthes with the dour theologian Karl Barth in a chance conversation; several discussions on the virtues of Rabelais as well as a restoration to prominence of Anatole France, who had been given the French intellectualist bum's rush; a powerful coupling of the bright birth of film with the sad death of Fellini; a scholar's relishing of Bertolt Brecht's body odor; the music of his fellow Czech Leos Janácek. Like the proverbial meal at the Chinese restaurant, the delicious musings of this book are filling at first. Two hours later, one craves more. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Cultivated, worldly, charming and spirited…Kundera’s values are sane and humane; his impulses generous; his taste, overall, unimpeachable.” — Phillip Lopate, San Francisco Chronicle

“I can’t imagine reading this book without being challenged and instructed, amused, amazed and aroused, and ultimately delighted.” — John Simon, New York Times Book Review

“A commanding, compelling collection. . . . Kundera’s essays express enduring aesthetic loyalties and provide unexpected aesthetic sparks that remind readers of a fuller range of authentic thought and feeling.” — Michael S. Roth, Los Angeles Times

“Compelling essays.” — Boston Sunday Globe

“Deeply personal and warmly inviting…Encounter serves as a call to arms for a culture on the verge of losing its artistic credibility.” — Time Out New York

“A remarkable collection that showcases the author’s diverse interests and sparkling talent…Kundera looks at the way exile and estrangement impact upon art and creation.” — New York Journal of Books

From the Publisher

Cultivated, worldly, charming and spirited…Kundera’s values are sane and humane; his impulses generous; his taste, overall, unimpeachable.

Phillip Lopate

A commanding, compelling collection. . . . Kundera’s essays express enduring aesthetic loyalties and provide unexpected aesthetic sparks that remind readers of a fuller range of authentic thought and feeling.

Michael S. Roth

Compelling essays.

Boston Sunday Globe

A remarkable collection that showcases the author’s diverse interests and sparkling talent…Kundera looks at the way exile and estrangement impact upon art and creation.

New York Journal of Books

Deeply personal and warmly inviting…Encounter serves as a call to arms for a culture on the verge of losing its artistic credibility.

Time Out New York

A collection of essays, book, music and art reviews, ruminations and recollections by the celebrated Franco-Czech novelist (Ignorance, 2002, etc.). Kundera's mind is an expansive forest, and he visits many trees in these pieces, some more than a dozen years old. In some cases he writes about painters, musicians and novelists whose names and works are widely known (Celine, Philip Roth, Beethoven, Breton). Elsewhere, he expatiates about the creations of artists whose identities are known principally by the cognoscenti, companions and countrymen. The latter include the music of Iannis Xenakis, the paintings of Ernest Breleur and the writings of Danilo Kis. Regardless of the subject, Kundera's prose glows, sometimes in sufficient strength to illuminate even the most obscure of his subjects. The pieces all share a compression of style-his few words say much-and even some experimentation. In an essay on painter Francis Bacon, for example, he alternates 1995 observations with what he had written initially in 1977. (He employs a similar strategy later in a piece about Xenakis' music.) Kundera writes with passion about what he views as the foolishness of surrendering a friendship to political differences, and he snarls about the deleterious influence of film and television in a piece about the 100th anniversary of the motion picture, which he labels "the principal agent of stupidity" in the world. The author marvels about the Allied occupation forces after World War II, especially the Americans, who seemed so sublimely confident in their divine election and sanction. Continually, he revisits the hopeful Prague spring of 1968 and its hideous aftermath and agrees with Czech writer Vera Linhartova, who wrote how exile can be transformative for an artist. He chides biographers who are enraptured with the sex lives, and even body odors, of their subjects, and he wonders about the artistic portrayal of the ugly. Shows that bright shards of clear prose can serve as windows into the unknown.

Kirkus Reviews