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Encounter

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Milan Kundera's newest foray into the essay, "Encounter," continues his critical engagement with the history and aesthetic of the European novel and the place and importance of art today. It contains four longer essays (fifteen to twenty pages each) on, respectively, the art of Francis Bacon, an "homage" to Anatole France, the artistic sensibilities of particular Martinican poets (Aime Cesair among them), and Curzio Malaparte's novel "The Skin." Most of these essays, however, are occasional pieces which rarely exceed four or five pages in length. Because of their length, they are almost necessarily underdeveloped. Many of these shorter pieces should have been made more substantial and elaborated upon. Kundera's insight and coolly analytical approach would have greatly benefitted the ideas they were lavished upon, as in the longer essays. If anything, that would be the one thing that I would change about this collection.

That having been said, there are a great many things of particular interest in this book. In his first substantial essay - the one on Bacon - he states a distinct paradox that all artists confront in the pursuit of their craft (see below for the extent to which one of the main concerns of this text is paradox): how does one capture the essence of a human (in this case, the work in question is Bacon's triptych of Henrietta Moraes) whose very essence is accidental? Kundera's answer is that Bacon distorts and contorts the images of people to see to what someone can have this done to them, but still maintain their identity; Kundera calls this Bacon's "brutal gesture."

One of the most fascinating pieces is "The Comical Absence of the Comical" in which he discusses how our mundane understanding of the word "comic" as "provoked by something amusing or comical" is sadly incomplete. He examines several instances in the novels of Dostoyevsky in which characters laugh in the most awkward and tragic of circumstances, as when Prince Mishkin is castigated by Aglaia by a "severe laughter" for having the bad taste to fall asleep while waiting for her. This is not a laughter whose provenance is in the human sense of the comic, but rather one that punishes, de-situates and reorganizes our response to this scene.

The extended essay on the work of Anatole France, while thematically disorganized and rather discursive, is largely an account of certain aspects of France's novel "The Gods Are Thirsty." The essay also incorporates a Surrealist critique of France, spearheaded by Paul Valery, who would later fill France's chair at the Academie Francaise upon the novelist's death. Andre Breton's critique impugned France for his "skepticism, realism, and heartlessness," though Kundera makes an intelligent argument for France's "cohabitation of unbearably dramatic history with unbearable, banal dailiness, a cohabitation that sparkles with irony." These interesting juxtapositions, as mentioned above, perennially interest Kundera throughout the collection as when, in a highly thoughtful essay on the work of Leos Janacek, Kundera concludes that "Janacek has managed to say what only an opera can say: the unbearable nostalgia of insignificant talk at an inn [he is referencing a scene from Janacek's "Cunning Little Vixen"] cannot be expressed any other way than by opera: the music becomes the fourth dimension of a situation which without it would remain anodyne, unnoticed, mute."

In the last paragraph of the entire book, Kundera ties together two of the themes that have informed not just this collection of his essays, but his entire body of work: the history of Europe and the perceived profound ordinariness of truth. "The war's closing moments bring out a truth that is both fundamental and banal, both eternal and disregarded: compared with the living, the dead have an overwhelming numerical superiority, not just the dead of this war's end but all the dead of all times, the dead of the past, the dead of the future; confident in their superiority, they mock us, they mock this little island of time we live on, this tiny time of the new Europe, they force us to grasp all its insignificance, all its transience."

Every now and then a book comes along that makes you pause and say to yourself "why have I not read more by this author." "Encounter" by Milan Kundera is just this book. I picked it up after seeing that it was named one of the NY Times Notable Bookes of 2010 and I was not dissapointed. Kundera as people know is a Czech writer who was exiled in 1975 and has lived in France every since. His books were banned by the old Czechoslovakian Communist government until 1989 when the Velvet Revolution hit and the country was opened up again.

This book, which in truth is a collections of stories and thoughts by Kundera, reminds me most of "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" which he wrote in 1979 and which tells ofCzech citizens opposing the Communist regime in various ways. In "Encounter" he spends a lot of time talking about his opnions of art and artists includign Fellini and Schoenberg as well as Francis Bacon. I was pleasantly surprised to also read a short piece on one of my favorite novelists Philip Roth. Finally, he spends a great deal of time on the Carribean island of Martinique--a place of beauty and interest--and makes it come alive to the reader. A good collection of thoughts that helps you get a bit into the mind of Milan Kundera and I highly recommend it.

Wonderful followup to "The Curtain". Rich in it's examination of the novel, but also moves into painting, music, and poetry.

Mainly a defense of writing as art, especially with the examination of Malaparte and contrasting his work to Sartre's quote: "Prose is in essence utilitarian...the writer is a speaker: he designates, demonstrates, orders, rejects, questions, entreats, insults, persuades, insinuates."

Both in Malaparte's excerpts and Kundera's explanations, we find that writing can move far beyond utilitarian, in his last paragraph:

The war's closing moments bring out a truth that is both fundamental and banal, both eternal and disregarded: compared to the living, the dead have an overwhelming numerical superiority, not just the dead of this war's end but all the dead of all times, the dead of the past, the dead of the future; confident in their superiority, they mock us, they mock this little island of time we line in, this tiny time of the new Europe, they force us to grasp all its insignificance, all it's transience...

Like most of Kundera's books of essays there is a mixture of humility and chattiness that are both a strength and weakness of the book. The tone welcomes the reader and does not put him/her off with Kundera's sense of expertise but invites the reader to share in his experience, but the result is often not particularly insightful. However, there are little bits of insight buried in the book if you do the work of reading some of the quick and superficial looks at paintings, music and novels. The last long piece is particularly interesting, providing a review of the writer Malaparte (whom I'd never heard of) and his two books written immediately following WWII, particularly the Skin. Kundera appreciates the art of this novel and Malaparte's attempts to utilize many different forms to create his work.

Kundera's wide ranging reading in Eastern Europe also introduce many not very well known writers in this part of the world. Unfortunately, some of the authors I couldn't find in English when I wanted to go read them as well.

As always Kundera highlights the importance of laughter and humor in art, of focusing on the art's portrayal of humanity and beauty and not on politics and horror.

I love Kundera's fiction, but did not realize this book is more of an art analysis so I was dissapointed.

Much of what I read is obscure, so the parts of this book that are unfamiliar to most readers strike me as being clearer than the usual studies of irony. There is an interview in which Milan Kundera is asked about "positive thinking" as a rejection of irony toward all orthodoxies, in which his response calls it a rejection of art. In praise of Salman Rushdie: Rushdie underscores the principle of the non-serious that is precisely one of those possibilities for the art of the novel that lay neglected throughout its history. (1994).

Milan Kundera continues his penetrating cultural commentaries with ENCOUNTER. The only drawback for this American is Kundera's focus on less well-known European writers and history.