THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 7, 1996 TAG: 9604050674
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL ANFT
LENGTH: Medium: 67 lines
TESTAMENTS BETRAYED
MILAN KUNDERA
HarperCollins. 280 pp. $24.
Some writers will do anything to get even with biographers, critics, literary caretakers and rotten interpreters.
Take vaunted novelist Milan Kundera (Immortality, The Unbearable Lightness of Being), for example. Not only does he go so far as to take on the defilers and desecrators of others' art, but he also artfully weaves his argument through a seamless and intellectually vigorous nine-part essay.
Testaments Betrayed is much like a Kundera novel: full of truths and life's richness, leavened with ironic bursts of humor and heightened by his concise, crystal-clear style. But in contrast, this book's point - that the works by great creators of every genre are often lessened by those who later interpret them - and the method by which he elucidates it are decidedly didactic. Kundera's message: An artist's intent must be honored at all costs.
Those woeful historical figures who haven't done right by their betters often include the well-meaning ``friends'' who either performed works or were entrusted with them. Among those featured in Kundera's Hall of Shame:
Franz Kafka's literary executor and friend, Max Brod, who turned what Kundera terms ``Kafkology'' into its own brand of worship instead of following through on Kafka's wishes for his works. Brod not only falsely blew Kafka up into a saintly, suffering, quasi-religious figure but committed the ultimate betrayal by refusing to burn Kafka's correspondence and minor works, as the author had requested of him.
Igor Stravinsky's former colleague, Ernest Ansermet, who began to deride the composer when he admonished him for not playing ``what is written.''
The Ernest Hemingway biographer who claimed that the short story, ``Hills Like White Elephants,'' is about the writer and his wife, who may have discussed aborting their second child. Hence, the biographer turned an open-ended, multi-dimensional story into a pro-life polemic rife with herd-driven arguments. He is guilty of espousing the wrong-minded notion, common among literary undertakers, that all of an author's work relates directly to his life.
But Kundera's argument is less than half the story here. As usual, the fluidity of his prose is a wonder in and of itself. There are no transitions too difficult to be traversed, no train of thought left huffing on the track. His considerable skills at weaving many strands into one sturdy thread are demonstrated most amply in the book's opening essay, ``The Day Panurge No Longer Makes People Laugh,'' in which Kundera links Cervantes, Rabelais and Salman Rushdie in a chain forged by their approach to humor, ``an invention,'' he writes, ``bound up with the birth of the novel.''
Also, for Kundera's fans who eagerly await his next novel, Slowness, there are breathtaking moments that will tide them over. Such as: ``There are almost no trees in Iceland, and the few that exist are all in the cemeteries; as if there were no dead without trees, as if there were no trees without the dead.'' In the great essayist tradition, Kundera doesn't just throw around such profundities. Instead, he uses them as jumping-off points or as segues that lead into his next example.
All of which makes Testaments Betrayed particularly rewarding reading. MEMO: Michael Anft is a Baltimore-based writer and critic. by CNB