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andriawrites's review against another edition
4.0
An excellent and thought provoking ensemble of essays from one of the greatest writers of our time. Like in his fiction, Kundera's writing is majestic, clear and just so damn great. The essays in "Encounter" range from meditations on the work of painter Francis Bacon, to the avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis, to the modern legacy and influence of the French renaissance writer Rabelais, and the founders of a Martinican literary identity, with the discussion of writers like Aimé Césaire,among others. The latter was actually one of my favourite essays along with the one on Anatole France. Kundera explores the works and themes of important 20th century writers that have unfortunetly slipped between the cracks of time. Before this book, I was unfamiliar with writers like Anatole France, Oscar Milosz, and Curzio Malaparte,but now, after reading these essays, Kundera's writings on them have more than piqued my interest, and I look forward to reading their actual works.
"Encounter" was just a great reminder about how Kundera's prose is triumphant in both fiction and essays. His writing is always poetical, and therefore, always a joy to read.
"Encounter" was just a great reminder about how Kundera's prose is triumphant in both fiction and essays. His writing is always poetical, and therefore, always a joy to read.
steveatwaywords's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.5
Arguably, my rating might be higher had I laid eyes on his written word rather than done this as an audio book. (Certainly Kundera would have preferred it.) Kundera's ideas turn quickly, following threads and themes rich and detailed, linking everything from Kafka to opera to Italian fascist politics to reverie on his pet dog, all of it exposing not only a cascade of European modernist understanding but a complex introduction to the writer himself.
All of this--from his fandom of early 19th and 20the century European art, diatribes against the age of advertising, historical storytelling on the composition of opera, what it means to walk by a particular church--are ripe with ennui, nostalgia, magnetism. Listening/reading to Kundera means a stepping back into a Vienna, Prague, or Paris that demands our memory, our grasp of its rich thought.
And I get it. It was difficult for me, while listening though, not to hear an aging writer haranguing the post-modern age which stretches into new directions and uncertainties. Surely, Kundera, the world before--for which you have sore affection with its Nazisms and Communisms and fascisms--does not stand so remarkably and unequivocally above contemporary mores and debates?
I'm anxious, even so, to read The Art of the Novel, another essay collection, which promises to focus more on the works themselves and the state of the novel in particular. At his best, Kundera's wry humor and characterizations, along with his sincere reflections on personal relationships, make his sentences unique discoveries; it's when he leans too heavily into grumpiness and sinks his boots too deeply into saudade that I found myself a bit put off.
All of this--from his fandom of early 19th and 20the century European art, diatribes against the age of advertising, historical storytelling on the composition of opera, what it means to walk by a particular church--are ripe with ennui, nostalgia, magnetism. Listening/reading to Kundera means a stepping back into a Vienna, Prague, or Paris that demands our memory, our grasp of its rich thought.
And I get it. It was difficult for me, while listening though, not to hear an aging writer haranguing the post-modern age which stretches into new directions and uncertainties. Surely, Kundera, the world before--for which you have sore affection with its Nazisms and Communisms and fascisms--does not stand so remarkably and unequivocally above contemporary mores and debates?
I'm anxious, even so, to read The Art of the Novel, another essay collection, which promises to focus more on the works themselves and the state of the novel in particular. At his best, Kundera's wry humor and characterizations, along with his sincere reflections on personal relationships, make his sentences unique discoveries; it's when he leans too heavily into grumpiness and sinks his boots too deeply into saudade that I found myself a bit put off.
blueyorkie's review against another edition
4.0
This work is, after all, Kundera reader and music lover (when he leaves the field of music addiction), a man of his century (which one?). Romance in various forms of subjectively defending authors and composers; arguing objectively to plead the cause of the forgotten or unknown. This book delivers the keys to his work through his passions and astonishment.
He gives the impression of integrity and is faithful to his literary favourites.
A book to read and reread as it is rich.
That's an invitation to read and open up your field of knowledge.
He gives the impression of integrity and is faithful to his literary favourites.
A book to read and reread as it is rich.
That's an invitation to read and open up your field of knowledge.
screen_memory's review against another edition
4.0
Encounter, a collection of essays, offers an illuminating and historicist perspective to a myriad of topics such as the brutal gestures of the “rapist hand” of Francis Bacon which endeavors to discover the buried self; a novel perspective on humor, or “The Comical Absence of the Comical,” in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Gabriel Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as representative of the arch-novel; a meditation on the blacklist as inspired by Kundera’s lover for the blacklisted Anatole France; numerous tributes to Rabelais, Bach, Louis Aragon, Oscar Milosz, Schoenberg, and of course Kundera’s precious composer, Leoš Janáček.
He writes of life in exile; the liberation of exile, as explained by fellow Czech writer Vera Linhortova; the lives of fellow émigrés; the Prague Spring of 1968 and its coincidental historical nearness to the French May of the same year; etc. Inspired by his upbringing at the hand of his pianist father, Kundera writes extensively of Bach’s fugues, Schoenberg’s legacy (the forgetting of Schoenberg as well; our fight to ensure that the Nazi murderers may never be forgotten at the expense of our memory of Schoenberg), Janáček’s “antiromantic expression,” Stravinsky’s ouvre. Numerous poets and novelists also find their place within Encounter. Even the medium of film is examined by Kundera’s critical prose.
Approaching the subject from the angle of the celebration of 100 years of film, he states that “the new technology has become, primo, the principal agent of stupidity (incomparably more powerful than the bad literature of old),” and laments the generation that has forgotten Frederico Fellini. Fellini, who Kundera believes has achieved through film the greatest aspiration of Surrealism by incorporating the dream into reality, had, in his later period, argued with the media magnate Silvio Berlusconi over his “allowing televised films to be interrupted by advertising” — “A confrontatiion between two different legacies from the brothers Lumière (history’s first filmmakers): between film as art and film as agent of stupidity. We know the outcome: film as art has lost.”
Encounter is as tragic as it is triumphant. In it art the artist’s laments over a generation that has reached the border of all art, of all music, of all life. Many ideologies, mediums, movements, etc. see their demise before them, if it has not been delivered already. We are living in the age of forgetting, of loss. Indeed, we have forgotten about Schoenberg, about Fellini, we gravely misunderstand Janáček. Additionally, we are forgetting about the novel as an art form.
As is the case with Calvino’s Why Read the Classics? And the author’s own Testaments Betrayed, one would be best off establishing a firsthand familiarity with the artists, composers, and other figures Kundera explores before returning to this work. It is, even with only a cursory or non-existent knowledge of most of Kundera’s subjects, an enlightening and penetrating read.
He writes of life in exile; the liberation of exile, as explained by fellow Czech writer Vera Linhortova; the lives of fellow émigrés; the Prague Spring of 1968 and its coincidental historical nearness to the French May of the same year; etc. Inspired by his upbringing at the hand of his pianist father, Kundera writes extensively of Bach’s fugues, Schoenberg’s legacy (the forgetting of Schoenberg as well; our fight to ensure that the Nazi murderers may never be forgotten at the expense of our memory of Schoenberg), Janáček’s “antiromantic expression,” Stravinsky’s ouvre. Numerous poets and novelists also find their place within Encounter. Even the medium of film is examined by Kundera’s critical prose.
Approaching the subject from the angle of the celebration of 100 years of film, he states that “the new technology has become, primo, the principal agent of stupidity (incomparably more powerful than the bad literature of old),” and laments the generation that has forgotten Frederico Fellini. Fellini, who Kundera believes has achieved through film the greatest aspiration of Surrealism by incorporating the dream into reality, had, in his later period, argued with the media magnate Silvio Berlusconi over his “allowing televised films to be interrupted by advertising” — “A confrontatiion between two different legacies from the brothers Lumière (history’s first filmmakers): between film as art and film as agent of stupidity. We know the outcome: film as art has lost.”
Encounter is as tragic as it is triumphant. In it art the artist’s laments over a generation that has reached the border of all art, of all music, of all life. Many ideologies, mediums, movements, etc. see their demise before them, if it has not been delivered already. We are living in the age of forgetting, of loss. Indeed, we have forgotten about Schoenberg, about Fellini, we gravely misunderstand Janáček. Additionally, we are forgetting about the novel as an art form.
As is the case with Calvino’s Why Read the Classics? And the author’s own Testaments Betrayed, one would be best off establishing a firsthand familiarity with the artists, composers, and other figures Kundera explores before returning to this work. It is, even with only a cursory or non-existent knowledge of most of Kundera’s subjects, an enlightening and penetrating read.
kewlpinguino's review against another edition
Eh, this is a hard one to rate. I can now say I'm a Kundera fan, but I don't find him very likable in some ways. He's always fascinating, but not always right; which is okay, really.
fluentinsilence's review against another edition
4.0
ben erg onder de indruk van het laatste essay over Malaparte's De Huid.