"A defense of fiction and a lesson in the art of reading." — New York Times Book Review " Testaments Betrayed  is to be savored paragraph by paragraph. . . . It must be purchased, read, pondered, and argued within the margins. And frequently reread." —  Washington Post A brilliant and thought-provoking essay from one of the twentieth century’s masters of fiction, Testaments Betrayed is written like a novel: the same characters appear and reappear throughout the nine parts of the book, as do the principal themes that preoccupy the author. Kundera is a passionate defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due a work of art and its creator’s wishes. The betrayal of both—often by their most passionate proponents—is one of the key ideas that informs this strikingly original and elegant book. "A fascinating idiosyncratic meditation on the moral necessity of preserving the artist's work from destructive appraisal. . . . One reads this book to come in contact with one of the most stimulating minds of our era." - Boston Globe "A defense of fiction and a lesson in the art of reading." - New York Times Book Review "A feast of ideas. . . a passionate statement of faith in artistic modes of perception." - Philadelphia Inquirer " Testaments Betrayed is to be savored paragraph by paragraph. . . . It must be purchased, read, pondered, and argued within the margins. And frequently reread." - Washington Post A brilliant and thought-provoking essay from one of the twentieth century’s masters of fiction, Testaments Betrayed is written like a novel: the same characters appear and reappear throughout the nine parts of the book, as do the principal themes that preoccupy the author. Kundera is a passionate defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due a work of art and its creator’s wishes. The betrayal of both—often by their most passionate proponents—is one of the key ideas that informs this strikingly original and elegant book. The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929–2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975 until his death. He is the author of the novels The Joke , Life Is Elsewhere , Farewell Waltz , The Book of Laughter and Forgetting , The Unbearable Lightness of Being , and Immortality , and the short story collection Laughable Loves —all originally in Czech. His more recent novels, Slowness , Identity , Ignorance , and The Festival of Insignificance , as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed , The Curtain , and Encounter , were originally written in French. Testaments Betrayed Essay in Nine Parts, an By Kundera, Milan Perennial Copyright © 2004 Milan Kundera All right reserved. ISBN: 0060927518 The Day Panurge No Longer Makes People Laugh The Invention of Humor The pregnant Madame Grandgousier ate too much tripe, and they had to give her a purgative; it was so strong that the placenta let go, the fetus Gargantua slipped into a vein, traveled up her system, and came out of his mama's ear. From the very first lines, Rabelais's book shows its hand: the story being told here is not serious: that is, there are no statements of truths here (scientific or mythic); no promise to describe things as they are in reality. Rabelais's time was fortunate: the novel as butterfly is taking flight, carrying the shreds of the chrysalis on its back. With his giant form, Pantagruel still belongs to the past of fantastic tales, while Panurge comes from the yet unknown future of the novel. The extraordinary moment of the birth of a new art gives Rabelais's book an astounding richness; it has everything: the plausible and the implausible, allegory, satire, giants and ordinary men, anecdotes, meditations, voyages real and fantastic, scholarly disputes, digressions of pure verbal virtuosity. Today's novelist, with his legacy from the nineteenth century, feels an envious nostalgia for the superbly heterogeneous universe of those earliest novelists and for the delightful liberty with which they dwelt in it. Just as Rabelais starts his book by dropping Gargantua onto the world's stage from his mama's ear, so in The Satanic Verses , after a midair plane explosion, do Salman Rushdie's two heroes fall through the air chattering, singing, and carrying on in comic and improbable fashion. While "above, behind, below them in the void" float reclining seats, paper cups, oxygen masks, and passengers, one of them--Gibreel Farishta--swims "in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spread eagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn," and the other--Saladin Chamcha--like "a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides. . . a bowler hat on his head." The novel opens with that scene, for, like Rabelais, Rushdie knows that the contract between the novelist and the reader must be established fro