Death is elsewhere

How Milan Kundera rejuvenated and defended the art of the novel

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

The as-of-last-week late Milan Kundera was many things. The author of the book that made Nicholas Lezard a better lover (so what he himself once called Philip Roth: “a great historian of modern eroticism”). An essayist on world literature, Bohemia and classical music, although in a time of frenetic substackers and piece-thinkers, calling him an essayist doesn’t quite justify his achievement: he wrote essays sparingly and exactingly, treated them like he did novels, always meticulous about their structure. (Even interviews he stopped giving unless he could co-write and -edit them.) For most importantly he wrote novels and his most important essays were about them. He was our last great theoretician of the novel.

The novel here doesn’t mean the Czech or French novel of his original and adopted homelands, and defintely not the Anglo-American novel us anglos and Americans are mostly familiar with. While insistent that the novel was Europe’s “art form par excellence” he knew it was writers from elsewhere — Gabriel García Márqez, Carlos Funetes, Salman Rushdie - who’d found in the form new doors and halls, had shown there wasn’t an end yet to the old country pile…

Still, he liked especially to champion what he called the Central European pleiad, comprising Robert ‘The Man Without Qualities’ Musil, Hermann ‘The Sleepwalkers’ Broch, Witold ‘Ferdydurke’ Gombrowicz, and Franz ‘all your weird dreams’ Kafka (and also-ran Jaroslav Hašek, whose novel The Good Soldier Švejk he loved for its comic spirit but correctly averred, “Don’t ask me to admire its length!”). These authors were another axis to set alongside the Joyce/Flaubert one further West, and so expand our notion of the novel, not least beyond our usual, numbing battle-lines.

While today we’re still pitching the bourgeois novel’s complicity in repressive social reproduction against an avant garde whose burbling will any moment now overturn the ideological state apparatus (or: “with every novel published that rejects traditional notions of narrative, structures of material oppression crumble before our very eyes”) Kundera never scorned the novel form. To his…