Milan Kundera's meeting.

This book is Milan Kundera's fourth collection of essays after The Art of Fiction, The Betrayed Will and The Curtain. It is divided into nine parts, covering painting, literature, music and other fields. Kundera, as always, went in and out of the kingdom of art, and recalled his encounters with Francis Bacon, fuentes, Schoenberg, Anatole France and others in the book. This is not only an aesthetic encounter, but also an encounter of several times, and it is also an encounter between the author and his old theme and old love.

Book Review: Like a multiple encounter.

This time, Kundera finally broke through the "doom" of "Seven".

Written in early 2009, Meeting is divided into nine parts, starting with Bacon's painting and ending with what he called "original novel"-the skin of Mara Parti. After The Art of Fiction and The Betrayed Will, Kundera once again reiterated his definition of novel, which also extended to the artistic fields including painting, film and music.

Meeting still hasn't left Kundera's favorite keywords: lightness, laughter, forgetfulness, memory, history ... Only after reading the meeting, I suddenly found that Kundera's novels have gone through half a century if they started with jokes. Therefore, the protagonists in Meet have expanded from rabelais, Dostoevsky and Gambro Vichy in novel art to Francis, Salina, philip roth and Mara Parti. Of course, rabelais, Dostoevsky and Gambro are still there. The "first half" and "second half" of European novels exist, and so does Latin America. If modern literature still wants to find miracles, it can't give up. In Kundera's own words, perhaps "meeting" itself is "a multiple meeting".

In this sense, Kundera is persistent. When all theorists are clamoring for "the end of novel (or literature)", Kundera stays at the starting point half a century ago. Who can not be moved by such an imagination? Obviously, it is necessary to remember-it is said at the beginning that "meet my old theme (existence and aesthetics) and meet my old love"-but such a movement is the future direction, which is wishful thinking. Because, in Kundera's view, politics is not eternal, history is not eternal, and even memory is not eternal. Only novels as "detectors of existence" can be-if they are not very opposed to the word-eternal and can cross the boundaries of time. Isn't it? Rabelais had been writing novels before he existed in the name of novels. Therefore, even if one day, the novel can no longer exist in the name of novel, we can still expect it to give us a surprise to explore existence in some unexpected form.

Kundera in Meet is still the familiar Kundera, a Kundera who will never forget to tell us two cold jokes when he eloquently expounds his definition of novel or art, one is tall and the other is short-French poet rene char, hero of World War II, German philosopher Heidegger, who is controversial because he agrees with Nazi thought, or Brecht was "proved" (thirty years after his death! ), is it a Haitian producer poet who once had a crush on French surrealist leader Brighton? This is somewhat unacceptable for us who can't completely indulge in post-modern debris and ignore everything. However, we are not unaware that all cold jokes point to the same truth, that is, if a novel is a detector of existence, it should not be influenced by other factors. All the cold jokes are outside the novel.