Trumpet for lost voices

Then came 1968 and the Soviet crackdown on an incipient revolution. The choking life became intolerable and Kundera was eventually to move to France where he took out French citizenship.

But now that that seemingly interminable polity has concluded, from where does the writer’s recalcitrance rage? What prevailed throughout was his resistance to a cloying control exercised by at first, naked totalitarianism and later, oppressive regimes of any kind. His truly memorable totem against all such activity – the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting – serves as a warning and as a cultural watershed. In his new book of essays, he takes up the theme in as strong a vein as ever.

Encounter is a collection of 31 essays written over the years, with some updated, on his literary and musical titans. In one, he rails against contemporary culture which, as evidenced in a 1999 article in a Parisian newspaper about 18 geniuses of the century, elevated Coco Chanel, Bill Gates, Yves Saint Laurent, among others, ahead of novelists and dramatists. No philosophers and just one each in the fields of architecture and painting. In a parallel note to forgetting political horrors Kundera pleads against an intellectual amnesia. He suspects a return of the horrors if these people are eroded from the European cultural bedrock.

Kundera attempts to recalibrate the machinery of canonical wisdom. He gives ample space to the writing of a minor, if not obscure, Italian novelist Malaparte. He resurrects the literary culture of early 20th century Haiti.

For the vast majority of people, probably even the vast majority of academia, such individuals don’t even make it to footnotes. Kundera dusts them down, gives them a touch up here and there and places them back on the mantlepiece of modern literature.

This book of essays opens with a complex analysis of the artistic relationship between novelist Samuel Beckett and painter Francis Bacon. Kundera ponders the limits of human expression in Beckett’s pared-down minimalism and Bacon’s distorted figures. Where does an examination of life became so abstract as to be worthless? In the end he endorses both men.

If writing is his first love, music isn’t far behind and he writes very technical appreciations of Schoenberg and rescues compatriot Janacek from his categorisation as a nationalist interpreter of folk ballads.

These essays are essentially an homage to mittel European intellectualism – that great flowering of genius that gave the world Kafka and Gombrowicz, Mann and Freud. Kundera’s is a paean to voices that were heard and the voices that could have been, but which were silenced by totalitarianism.