Une rencontre

Published after L’Art du roman (1986) and Les Testaments trahis (1993), this collection of essays is one of Kundera’s last books written in French. It brings together meditations on art and literature, ranging across Aragon, Breton, Césaire, Chamoiseau and Philip Roth, as well as Fellini, Eisenstein and Schoenberg.

Kundera champions the “passengers of the Exodus” — modernist artists across all disciplines — whom he sees as condemned to oblivion by the postmodern era. Marc Fumaroli, writing in Le Monde (20 March 2009), praised it as “the book in which Kundera is most passionately enthusiastic and most sharply irritated,” adding that the author brilliantly rehabilitates Curzio Malaparte, whose Kaputt and La Pelle are raised to the rank of monuments of allegorical prose, comparable to T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land.