Encounter (2009)

Encounter: Essays (French: Une rencontre) is a 2009 essay collection by the Czech-French writer Milan Kundera. It consists of essays on the works of writers, composers and painters of varying fame and recognition.

Contents

The Painter's Brutal Gesture: On Francis Bacon

Novels, Existential Soundings

The Comical Absence of the Comical (Dostoyevsky: The Idiot)

Death and the Fuss (Louis-Ferdinand Céline: From Castle to Castle)

Love in Accelerating History (Philip Roth: The Professor of Desire)

The Secret of the Ages of Life (Gudbergur Bergsson: The Swan)

The Idull, the Daughter of Horror (Marek Bieńczyk: Tworki)

The Debacle of Memories (Juan Goytisolo: The Curtain Falls)

The Novel and Procreation (Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude)

Blacklists, or Divertimento in Homage to Anatole France

The Dream of Total Heritage

A Dialogue on Rabelais and the Misomusists

The Dream of Total Heritage in Beethoven

The Arch-Novel: An Open Letter for the Birthday of Carlos Fuentes

The Total Rejection of Heritage, of Iannis Xenakis (a text published in 1980, with two interventions from 2008)

Beautiful Like a Multiple Encounter

Elsewhere

Exile as Liberation According to Věra Linhartová

The Untouchable Solitude of a Foreigner (Oscar Milosz)

Enmity and Friendship

Faithful to Rabelais and the Surrealists Who Delved into Dreams

On the Two Great Springs, and on the Škvoreckýs

From Beneath You'll Breathe the roses (The Last Visit with Ernest Breleur)

My First Love

The Long Race of a One-Legged Runner

The Most Nostalgic Opera

Forgetting Schoenberg

No Celebration (a text published in 1995 in the Frankfurter Rundschau together with other pieces celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the birth of cinema)

What Will Be Left of You, Bertolt?

Forgetting Schoenberg

The Skin: Malaparte's Arch-Novel