Encounter by Milan Kundera

This is a short but potent collection of essays that were written in French--Kundera wrote for a period of time in Czech, even after emigrating to France in 1968, but then switched to French--these essays are from that period. The book reminds me a bit of the memoir that Zadie Smith wrote this past year--a lot of reflections on artists.It is a tribute to Kundera's ability to weave his essayistic spell that my interest was undiminished by the fact that I am either wholly ignorant of many of the composers and writers discussed (Iannis Xenakis, Marek Bienczyk, Gudbergur Bergsson). In any case, Kundera's subjects are mirrors, offering variously distorted reflections on his own work and situation. As he says with reference to a remark by Francis Bacon about Beckett: "When one artist is talking about another, he is always talking (indirectly, in a roundabout way) of himself, and that is what's valuable in his judgment."
There is nothing archaeological or archival about Kundera's absorption in the literature of the past: it is more that his sense of what is contemporary has the deepest possible roots. Which is not the same thing at all as saying that literature is timeless. On the contrary. Kundera has always been alert to the ways in which different historical periods bury or exhume authors of the past according to their changing ideological and cultural needs. Something similar occurs in the lives of individual readers. Hence the most frequent encounter in Encounter is between Kundera as he felt about something (the music of Janacek, say, or the writings of Anatole France) back in the mid-1960s, in Prague, when he believed he was living in "a crumbling dictatorship", or when he moved to Paris after 1968 (when the dictatorship did the opposite of crumble), and how he feels now (in the wake of the collapse of that dictatorship). As always, this author's thoughts are worth reading.