(P/B) ENCOUNTER

Παρουσίαση

Milan Kundera's new collection of essays is a passionate defence of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterises his novels he illuminates the art and artists who remain important to him and whose work helps us better understand the world. An astute and brilliant reader of fiction, Kundera applies these same gifts to the reading of Francis Bacon's paintings, Leos Janacek's music, the films of Federico Fellini, as well as to the novels of Philip Roth, Dostoevsky and Garcia Marquez, among others. He also takes up the challenge of restoring to their rightful place the works of major writers such as Anatole France and Curzio Malaparte who have fallen into obscurity.
Milan Kundera's signature themes of memory and forgetting, the experience of exile, and his spirited championing of modernist art mark these essays. Art, he argues, is what we have to cleave to in the face of evil, against the expression of the darker side of human nature. Elegant, startlingly original and provocative, Encounter follows Kundera's essay collections, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed and The Curtain. (From the publisher)

Περιεχόμενα

THE PAINTER'S BRUTAL GESTURE: ON FRANCIS BACON
NOVELS, EXISTENTIAL SOUNDINGS
The Comical Absence of the Comical (Dostoyevsky: The Idiot)
Death and the Fuss (Louis-Ferdinand Celine: From Castle to Castle)
Love in Accelerating History (Philip Roth: The Professor of Desire)
The Secret of the Ages of Life (Gudbergur Bergsson: The Swan)
The Idyll, the Daughter of Horror (Marel Bienczyk Tworki)
The Debacle of Memories (Juan Goytisolo: The Curtain Falls)
The Novel and Procreation (Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude)
BLACKLISTS, OR DIVERTIMENTO IN HOMAGE TO ANATOLE FRANCE
THE DREAM OF TOTAL HERITAGE
A Dialogue on Rabelais and the Misomusists
The Dream of Total Heritage in Beethoven
The Arch-Novel: An Open Letter for the Birthday of Carlos Fuentes
The Total Rejection of Heritage, or lannis Xenakis (a text published in 1980, with two interventions from 2008)
BEAUTIFUL LIKE A MULTIPLE ENCOUNTER
ELSEWHERE
Exile as Liberation According to Vera Linhartova
The Untouchable Solitude of a Foreigner (Oscar Milosz)
Enmity and Friendship
Faithful to Rabelais and to the Surrealists Who Delved into Dreams
On the Two Great Springs, and on the Skvoreckys
From Beneath You'll Breathe the Roses (The Last Visit with Ernest Breleur)
MY FIRST LOVE
The Long Race of a One-Legged Runner
The Most Nostalgic Opera
FORGETTING SCHOENBERG
No Celebration (a text published in 1995 in the Frankfurter Rundschau together with other pieces celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the birth of cinema)
What Will Be Left of You, Bertolt?
Forgetting Schoenberg
THE SKIN: MALAPARTE'S ARCH-NOVEL