The art of storytelling, by Milan Kundera

The world of theories is not my world. These reflections are the reflections of a practitioner of the art of the novel. For the collection of works of every novelist contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel and of its essence. This conception of the novel, which is close to my own novels, is what I have made reveal itself in this book. Milan Kundera, in the book The Art of the Novel, begins to explore the question that occupied him throughout his literary career: What is the novel? What does it carry for us? Why is it necessary? In these seven texts, independent and intertwined at the same time, Kundera presents his personal view of the novel, where his reflections remain, throughout the book, linked to his constant reference to the writers who form the foundations of his personal vision of the history of the novel: Cervantes, Kafka, Broch, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Maupassant, Gombrowicz... The book may seem, in answering these questions, to lean towards a theoretical approach and only address specialists, but it is far from that. Kundera’s great strength lies in addressing his readers with a kind of simplicity and closeness, as Kundera does not aim to review the details of the question he tackles, but rather, with small touches, to penetrate to the core of the matter, achieving this as a writer uniquely inclined and with his own perspective on literature. Number of pages: 189