Product Description

Milan Kundera has established himself as one of the great novelists of our time with such books as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In Testaments Betrayed, he proves himself a brilliant defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due to a work of art and its creator's wishes. The betrayal of both -- often by their most passionate proponents -- is the principal theme of this extraordinary work. Readers will be particularly intrigued by Kundera's impassioned attack on society's shifting moral judgments and persecutions of art and artists, from Mayakovsky to Rushdie.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #435470 in Books
• Published on: 1996-08-08
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .74" h x 5.41" w x 8.03" l, .54 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Amazon.com
Milan Kundera, one of the twentieth century's masters of fiction and author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, offers a brilliant and thought provoking essay, following in the tradition of his highly regarded The Art of the Novel. Testaments Betrayed is written like a novel: the same characters appear and reappear throughout the nine parts of the book, as do the principal themes that preoccupy the author. Kundera once again celebrates the art of the novel, from its birth in a spirit of humor unique to European culture and sensibility - illustrated by some wonderful examples from the work of Rabelais and Cervantes - through its flowering in successive centuries. He celebrates the particular wisdom the novel offers about human existence.

From Publishers Weekly
In this stimulating, free-form essay, Czech novelist Kundera (The Art of the Novel) traces the evolution of the novel from Rabelais to Kafka and draws parallels between literature and music as he shuttles effortlessly among Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Chopin, Thomas Mann, Bach and Andre Breton. The betrayals implied by the title include conductor Ernest Ansermet's rejection of the music of his erstwhile friend Igor Stravinsky; the halfhearted support for Salman Rushdie by intellectuals who misconstrued his Satanic Verses as an attack on religious faith; and Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers's "kitsch-making" interpretations, which, in Kundera's view, confuse Hemingway's life with his fiction. Another alleged "testament betrayed" involves Max Brod, Kafka's friend and literary executor, accused here of promoting an image of Kafka as saintly martyr. Because of Brod, Kundera argues, Kafka's works tend to be read either as autobiographical or as religious allegories instead of as "the real world transformed by an immense imagination." First serial to the New York Review of Books.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
"Great works can only be born within the history of their art and as participants in that history," states noted Czech novelist Kundera at the opening of this work. What follows, however, is not a history or even a straightforward analysis of the art of fiction. Rather, Kundera skims along gracefully as a skater, touching several high points-in music and philosophy as much as literature-in a wholly original discussion of how fiction functions and how it is implicated in the fabric of Western culture. Throughout, he is concerned with the moral dimension of literature, though not as a tool of instruction. He condemns the small-mindedness that would put a novel to work for some agenda, inevitably turning it into kitsch. Instead, he sees the novel as moral precisely because it is "a realm where moral judgment is suspended," allowing for the free play of ideas. Plenty of wonderful ideas play freely here. Recommended for all literary collections.
Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.