The Art of the Novel is the second book of essays by Milan Kundera published by Nha Nam this year, after Betrayed Testaments .
The 231-page book consists of seven parts: The Lost Legacy of Cervantes; Conversations on the Art of the Novel; Notes Born of "Sleepwalkers"; Conversations on the Art of Structure; Somewhere Beyond There; Seventy-Two Words and The Jerusalem Speech: The Novel and Europe.
Cover of the book "The Art of the Novel" (Photo: Nha Nam).
Through seven chapters with separate contents connected in the same essay, Milan Kundera presents his personal views on the European novel and its history.
Some chapters are conversations between Kundera and Christian Salmon about the writer's writing habits and works. Others are devoted to his reflections on modern novelists such as Hermann Broch and Franz Kafka and the value they brought to the history of the novel.
From the very first page, Milan Kundera emphasizes the spirit of the book: "I have no theoretical ambitions and that this whole book is just the confession of a practitioner?
Every novelist's work contains an implicit view of the history of the novel, an idea of what a novel is; here I want to present that very idea, linked to my novels."
Author Milan Kundera in 1981 (Photo: Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images).
Milan Kundera, born in 1929, is a French author of Czech origin. He settled in France in 1975 and became a French citizen in 1981.
Early fame came from his Czech poems and novels, but he switched to writing entirely in French since 1995.
In addition to 14 novels and a collection of short stories, he also wrote plays, criticism and essays, with four volumes of literary essays written directly in French.
According to The Guardian, Milan Kundera passed away on July 11 in Paris after a period of serious illness.
Some of his works published in Vietnamese: Life is not here; Ridiculous love affairs; Farewell waltz; The unbearably light life; Immortality; Slow; Identity; Ignorance; The festival of nonsense...
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