Milan Kundera Critical Essay | Critical Review by Mark Hutchinson

SOURCE: "In Defense of Fiction," in New York Times Book Review, October 22, 1995, p. 30.

In the review below, Hutchinson addresses the main themes of Testaments Betrayed.

In 1979, while interviewing Milan Kundera for Corriere della Serra, the essayist Alain Finkielkraut remarked on how Mr. Kundera's style—"flowery, baroque"—in his first novel, The Joke, had become spare and limpid in his later books. Flowery? Baroque? On examining the French edition of The Joke, Mr. Kundera discovered that his translator had sown the book with metaphors. "The sky was blue"? No: "A periwinkle October sky hoisted its sumptuous colors on the masthead." This outlandish piece of literary embroidery was then used as the source text for the Argentine edition, among others. Nor did the book fare any better with Mr. Kundera's original English publisher, who helpfully edited out all the reflexive passages, along with the chapters on musicology, and then changed...
(read more)