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Milan Kundera. Les testaments trahis. Paris. Gallimard (Schoenhof, distr.). 1993. 325 pages. 110 F.
Milan Kundera continues his discussion on the art of the novel in his new collection of essays Les testaments trahis (The Betrayed Testaments), published seven years after L'art du roman (Eng. The Art of the Novel; see WLT 62:4, p. 685) by the same house, Gallimard. Breaking his traditional structure of seven parts, Kundera examines writers from Rabelais, Hemingway, and Kafka to Kundera himself, and musicians from Stravinsky to Janacek, this time in nine parts, each independent yet--like a novel--united by the theme of betrayed art. He advances his thesis of "the art of the novel being born from humor, i.e. laughing at God," arguing that humor--dispersed in a novel's ambiguity--is the most difficult aspect of art to understand. As in his...