Testaments Betrayed
By (Author) Milan Kundera
Faber & Faber
Faber & Faber
1st July 2005
6th May 2004
Main - Re-issue
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
891.86454
Paperback
288
Width 125mm, Height 198mm, Spine 22mm
230g
Testaments Betrayed is a book rich in ideas about the time in which we live and how we have become who we are, about Western culture in general. It is also a personal essay, in which Kundera discusses the experience of exile, and an impassioned attack on the shifting moral judgements and persecutions of art and artists.
Milan Kundera, born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, was a student when the Czech Communist regime was established in 1948, and later worked as a labourer, jazz musician and professor at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Prague. After the Russian invasion in August 1968, his books were proscribed. In 1975, he and his wife settled in France, and in 1981, he became a French citizen. 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 of the short-story collection Laughable Loves - all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity and Ignorance, as well as his non-fiction works The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.