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Testaments Betrayed:

Essay in Nine Parts, An
Front Cover
19 Reviews
HarperCollins, Aug 2, 1996 - Literary Collections - 288 pages

Milan Kundera has established himself as one of the great novelists of our time with such books as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In Testaments Betrayed, he proves himself a brilliant defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due to a work of art and its creator's wishes. The betrayal of both—often by their most passionate proponents—is the principal theme of this extraordinary work. Readers will be particularly intrigued by Kundera's impassioned attack on society's shifting moral judgments and persecutions of art and artists, from Mayakovsky to Rushdie.

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Review: Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

User Review  - Bruce - Goodreads

You can skip around, as I have, and read only the essays that interest you. Along with Czeslaw Milosz, one of the more learned intellectuals of the last 100 years, and sharing with Milosz the dilemma ... Read full review

Review: Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

User Review - Goodreads

Another excellent collection of Kundera's essays on the novel, the history of the novel and the meaning of being an artist. Some highlights: "One instant of ecstasy weighed more than a whole lifetime ...

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About the author (1996)

The Franco-Czech novelist and critic Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves—all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.

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