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Testaments Betrayed: Essay in Nine Parts, An

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This is one of the most important books I've ever read. It is of interest, of course, to people involved with literature, music, translation, or who are interested in Kafka, Picasso, Hemmingway, Stravinsky, or others Kundera talks about. But I think the real importance of this book applies to any reader. It has to do with Milan Kundera's beautiful illustrations as to how we as humans try to make our own heroes everyone else's heroes, too, and in the process destroy many of the things we value and love about them. This is a vital idea in the modern world, where celebrity, biography, and voyeurism are always so present. Also, the statements Kundera makes on the nature of friendship inspire deep reflection on the qualities of our relationships with those we hold dear.

In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera describes the waning days of modernism (focusing on the novel) in an historical (and at times hysterical) light. But what makes this book of interest to people who usually like to read novels rather than critiques of novels, is Kundera's marvelous ability to combine the lucid explanation and analysis of ideas with marvelous wit that seems almost foreign to serious tone of most modern literary criticism. In reading Testaments Betrayed I repeatedly experienced the wonderfully paradoxical feeling of laughing because of the profoundness, the very seriousness of Kundera's ideas

This is a moving book, written in Kundera`s clear, humorous style which talks about the novel and warns us from distortions of novels` meanings by translators who do not understand the authors. Kundera`s love for his art and breadth of vision is astounding and his teachings on life and philosophy on which this book is based on are very inspiring. Reading this brilliant masterpiece we will learn one thing: history- we can never get rid of history: "how sweet it would be to forget that monster". The suitable book for lover`s of Milan Kundera.

The fact that friends or opera bosses didn't respect the scores or the testaments of artists or had the power to impose their own vision on other's work, is for Milan Kundera an occasion to reflect on the history and rules of art and the novel, the freedom of the artist and ultimately, on freedom of speech.
His main examples are Franz Kafka (Max Brod didn't respect his testament which ordered to destroy all non published work) and Leos Janácek (whose opera score was `adapted' by an opera director).

Art has an autonomous status, its own laws. Art is not an imitation of reality. It is a unique expression of an individual. It is therefore logical that this individual possesses all rights over a work that emanates exclusively from him.
Moreover, one doesn't need biographical furor (Sainte-Beuve), to know the writer, painter or composer in order to understand his work. As Marcel Proust states: 'a book is the product of a self, other than the self we manifest in our habits.'
Milan Kundera detests also those critics who interpret a work of art with their own political, philosophical, religious convictions (see Adorno's scandalous critic of Stravinsky's music).

Essential for the novel are the facts that it is a realm where moral judgment is suspended, that there are no dogmas of psychological realism and that it breaks through the plausibility barrier with fantasy and humor (Rabelais, Cervantes) in order to apprehend better the real world.
It is evident that in these conditions art can be a dangerous weapon in the hands of political, religious, social, cultural, sexual, -in one word -, critical opponents of established powers. In the Rushdie case, `the guardians of the temple were powerless against a novel.'

I have a few remarks about this text.
Firstly, art is indeed an individual expression (of the artist's emotions), but true art is the craftsmanship to arouse emotions in the spectator, the listener, the reader.

Secondly, writers have normally a (few) friend(s) whom they ask to evaluate their work before submitting it to a publisher (in the case of Kafka, one of these persons was certainly Max Brod).

Thirdly, in `The Critic as Artist' Oscar Wilde expressed perfectly why art is so dangerous: `For when a work is finished it has as it were, an independent life of it own, and may deliver a message far other than that which was put into its lips.'
Therefore, it is absurd that an artist should fanatically impose his own `vision' on his work.

And lastly, Orwell's 1984 has not only a political dimension, but also a social, des(human)izing, Kafkaesque one (important facts happening or that happened in the world are only known by an all-powerful `secret team'). Its main theme is freedom to live, to know (`who controls the present, controls the past') and to speak. It is perhaps a bad novel, but an immortal good bad one.

This is a thought-provoking book and a must read for all lovers of art, and of literature in particular.

Expanding upon the delightful discourse of "Art of the Novel", "Testaments Betrayed" serves up a feast of appreciation for some of the greatest WORKS of the modern age. It explicitly makes connections between writers like Tolstoy and Kafka, and implicity links them with Milan Kundera's own work. A deeply felt and deeply moving homage.

Mostly excellent, great stuff about Hemingway's "Hills like white elephants" and Kafka. But he makes some real DUMB remarks about sumthin he seems to know nuthin about (worse than the stuff he pans by others), jazz and rock music: "...At jazz concerts people applaud. To applaud means:..." [try Kerouac for the relationship of jazz to audience instead]. "An important FACT [my caps]: at rock concerts people do not applaud [what?]. It would be almost sacrilege to applaud and thus bring to notice the critical distance between the person playing and the person listening..." [what about Jim Morrison yelling "shut up" to squealing teeny-boppers- or Captain Beefheart stopping to command "cut it out, man, it's not even in 4/4" to a clapping dodo]. "...there are no dynamic contrasts, everything is fortissismo [yeah, right]... and resembles screaming... we're no longer in those little nightspots [i am] ...we're in huge halls, in stadiums, pressed one against the next..." [sometimes, and i don't care for that myself, but that's not the totality of "rock"]. His comments are as silly and philistinic as some 'hipster' putting down all 'longhair' (classical) music after hearing Montovani.