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Description
Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher: Knowledge
Publication Year: 2023
Number of Pages: 192
When Paul Valéry was chosen to sit, in 1925, among the "immortals" of the French Academy, he was forced - he who had no special respect for the art of the novel - to express, in the speech he delivered, the praises of Anatole Francin, his predecessor. In a "panegyric" that became legendary, he not only managed to speak of Franc without ever mentioning his name, but, with subtle disloyalty, compared his works to those of Tolstoy, Ibsen, Zola, accusing him of for their convenience.
No wonder, Kundera warns us: the novelist hardly enters the ranks of those who embody the soul of a nation. Precisely for the sake of his art, the novelist is mainly "hidden, ambiguous, ironic" and especially - hidden behind his characters - he hardly identifies himself in a conviction, in an attitude: what matters to him, not it is History (and even less politics), but "the mystery of its actors". Like Beckett, he is free, even from the virtuous sense of duty, which would have him captive to a country or a language; like Danilo Kiš, he does not accept any label, even the tempting one of immigrant or dissident... And he often ends up on the black lists that regulate literary tastes: especially when, like Malaparte, he reveals to us the gloomy beauty of a the crazy reality of the new Europe, born of a great defeat, and a new, victorious and guilty way of being Europe
