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    Encounter: Essays
    Encounter: Essays
    Encounter: Essays
    Audiobook4 hours

    Encounter: Essays

    Written by Milan Kundera

    Narrated by Graeme Malcolm

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    “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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateSep 25, 2012
    ISBN9780062215635
    Encounter: Essays
    Author

    Milan Kundera

    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.

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    Reviews for Encounter

    4/5

    44 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Kundera’s book of essay was truly a wonderful surprise. Although on the very first essay I esitate (when he described thoughts of rape) it then evolves into a great collection of short stories and essays. Essays that analyze the writing of other authors and the evolving of the novel in depth and with great insight and a fresh point of view. In chapter fifteen he introduce the chezch poet Vera Linhartová with evident respect and bring forth her writing on exile, as she was exiled in France, just as Kundera and many others. She declared for the first time for and exiled artist the joy of having the freedom of being able to choose a place and a language and being elsewhere.
      “... for the writer is not a prisoner of anyone language” Věra Linhartová.
      Toward the very end, in my opinion, it loses a bit of the verve that run all along. My rating is almost a 5 star, easily a 4,75 with the assurance I will seek out other books he wrote in this style!
    • 4/5
      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."
    • 4/5
      This was a really invigorating read and the style was excellent. Unfortunately I am not as widely read as Milan Kundera and much of the content was obscure to me, which lessened my enjoyment.