A review by j_m_alexander
Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts by Milan Kundera

challenging funny informative medium-paced

3.5

 A masterfully orchestrated argument in favor of the novel and the artist, of privacy and respect for artistic work and the artist's wishes. Kundera critiques critics, well enough meaning translators and publishers, as well as those that perhaps are less well-meaning or think themselves more clever than they really are.

“novel: the realm where moral judgement is suspended. Suspending moral judgement is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding... the art of the novel, which teaches the reader to be curious about others and to try to comprehend truths that differ from his own.”

Kundera builds his case, he reinforces the arguments with further ones, and he ties it all back together, but he also does not over simplify or give it all to you on a platter. He focuses in on a few concrete cases: Kakfa, Gombrowicz, Hemingway, Janacek, Stravinsky, and even to a lesser degree his own writing; by doing so he weaves together a stronger case that is engaging straight through. In much of his defense of the novel and artist, Kundera is actually stripping away others' projections and seems to be asking for works to be appreciated and enjoyed for exactly what they are, nothing more and nothing less.

“I have always, deeply, violently, detested those who look for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality. Until Stravinsky, music was never able to give barbaric rites a grand form. We could not imagine them musically. Which means: we could not imagine the beauty of the barbaric. Without its beauty, the barbaric would remain incomprehensible. (I stress this: to know any phenomenon deeply requires understanding its beauty, actual or potential.) Saying that a bloody rite does possess some beauty—there's the scandal, unbearable, unacceptable. And yet, unless we understand this scandal, unless we get to the very bottom of it, we cannot understand much about man. Stravinsky gives the barbaric rite a musical form that is powerful and convincing but does not lie: listen to the last section of the Sacre, the "Danse sacrale" ("Sacrificial Dance"): it does not dodge the horror. It is there. Merely shown? Not denounced? But if it were denounced—stripped of its beauty, shown in its hideousness—it would be a cheat, a simplification, a piece of "propaganda." It is because it is beautiful that the girl's murder is so horrible.”

This nine-part essay asks the reader to think and question, and in the very end he even introduces a wrinkle that had been gnawing at me the whole way through the book, "...but would you really? ... could you in the end do as you say?" - not wholly as it turns out, for life if not black and white, there are exceptions, to Kundera's mind at least.

Quibble: I could have done with a more sparing use of the term cuckold/cuckolding. Perhaps an odd complaint to have about a work specifically bemoaning overt editing of artist's work, but it seems to be imagery the Kundera loves to bandy about and yet seems distracting.