Kundera or The Memory of Desire

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French Studies at the University
of Guelph. She is the author of Courts métrages et instantanés and La
Soupe.

Le Grand, a francophone professor of literature at the Université du
Québec а Montréal, has written an extended essay on the works of
Milan Kundera. In the book’s foreword, the Italian critic Guy
Scarpetta writes that he had never before read “anything … as
illuminating as the pages devoted by Eva Le Grand to Kundera’s
particular inimitable way of ‘musicalizing’ the novel.” Indeed,
Kundera and Le Grand seem to have met in what she calls his
“novelistic score in seven movements.” Again and again, Le Grand
mentions Kundera’s “variations,” his art of the counterpoint. In
Part I of the essay, “Kitsch and the Desire for Eternity,” she seeks
to grasp the difference between beauty and kitsch by “follow[ing] the
scattered paths of the very theme of beauty which crisscross Kundera’s
seven opuses.”

Illusion, sole glorification of feeling, sentimental ecstasy, kitsch
and politics, kitsch and beliefs, kitsch-man, kitsch-vision, kitsch that
becomes totalitarian through the “esthetic and emotional idealization
of what is real—death, wars, massacres, executions and
imprisonments”—like Kundera, Le Grand sees our time as an “era of
shamelessness” in which art is no longer valued. Like Agnes in
Immortality, we need to “slam the door in the face of kitsch, in the
face of the seductiveness of all its illusions.”

Kundera or The Memory of Desire offers hope to all those who still care
about aesthetics.