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…