The Philosopher Novelist

Milan Kundera has a strikingly capacious vision of the novel. In an interview with Philip Roth from 1980, he enumerated some of the elements of his fiction: “Ironic essay, novelistic narrative, autobiographical fragment, historic fact, flight of fancy.” The novel that made him famous, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is a meditation on philosophy, politics, and polyamory that employs all of these elements to narrate the intermingled stories of four lovers. The book even includes a printed excerpt from a musical score, Beethoven’s final string quartet, Opus 135. This abundance of forms allows him to make provocative and playful connections between seemingly disparate topics: political dictators and individual sexual taste, Nietzsche’s theory of history and Beethoven’s music.