Les Testaments trahis
One of the first 50 copies on vergé de Hollande paper (no. 29).
Les Testaments trahis is a collection of nine essays on art, centered on the art of the novel: the spirit of humor as Kundera conceives it, and its connections with music, notably that of Stravinsky and Beethoven. The collection was awarded the American Society of Composers prize for “best book written on music.”
On the novel, Kundera draws on the art of Rabelais, Rushdie, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Broch, Musil, Mann, Hemingway, Faulkner, Chamoiseau, and of course Kafka, in a spirited critical tribute to the Prague writer and to what Kundera calls the existential wisdom of the novel — a subject he would return to in his (rare) interviews: “this mixture of the grave and the light, the comic and the sad, meaning and nonsense […] gives rise to a strange beauty that has no equal; I would like to define this beauty, but I know I never will” (“Les Chefs-d’oeuvre de la littérature commentés par les écrivains d’aujourd’hui,” in Le Nouvel Observateur, special issue no. 83, July 2013, on The Trial).