The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera

Published 1986 · 165 pages · 36,957 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism

How hard is The Art of the Novel to read?

The Art of the Novel scores 34 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
Kundera writes in a conversational European intellectual register, defining every specialized term he introduces. Words like agélaste, Lebenswelt, and kitsch are explicitly glossed in the Sixty-three Words section or explained in context. The prose reads like an erudite friend talking over dinner, not an academic paper — accessible to any attentive reader without a dictionary.
Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
Kundera favors short, declarative, aphoristic sentences that land with epigrammatic force. The interview-dialogue sections with Christian Salmon move briskly in short exchanges. Even the longer essay passages build through paratactic accumulation of brief, clear assertions rather than Jamesian or Proustian subordination.
Abstraction: 55 out of 100
Kundera discusses ideas about the novel — ambiguity, kitsch, the forgetting of being — but always grounds them in concrete scenes from Cervantes, Kafka, Broch, and Musil. Every philosophical claim is illustrated with a specific character, plot point, or passage. The abstraction stays tethered to narrative examples rather than floating into pure theory.
Information density: 48 out of 100
Each essay focuses on one clear theme and develops it at a conversational pace. Kundera repeats key concepts across chapters, reinforcing rather than overloading. The Sixty-three Words section is dense by design but each entry is self-contained and brief. A reader can absorb a section in one sitting without rereading.
Narrative indirection: 38 out of 100
Kundera states his arguments with essayistic directness, declaring outright that 'the novel's sole raison d'etre is to say what only the novel can say' and defining key concepts like kitsch, vertigo, and the Kafkan in explicit definitional prose. The dialogue sections with Christian Salmon involve pointed questions and unambiguous answers rather than suggestive indirection. However, the layered references to Cervantes, Husserl, and Heidegger require the reader to synthesize philosophical threads across parts, and the book's central thesis about 'the wisdom of uncertainty' is demonstrated through accumulation rather than singular declaration.
Symbolic density: 42 out of 100
Kundera discusses other writers' symbols — Pasenow's uniform, Sabina's bowler hat, Esch's denunciations — rather than deploying symbolic structures of his own. The book does build recurring conceptual motifs (kitsch, lightness, the forgetting of being, God's laughter, the Cervantean inn) that function as organizing principles across all seven parts, giving them a quasi-symbolic resonance. Still, these operate as explicit intellectual categories rather than as buried allegories the reader must decode, placing the density well below Moby-Dick or even The Great Gatsby.
Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
Kundera champions irony as the novel's essential mode — 'the novel is, by definition, the ironic art' — and practices a measured ironic stance throughout, as when he describes the 'blissful smile' accompanying obituaries of the novel or calls the unification of mankind a 'spiteful' fulfillment of humanist dreams. The Jerusalem Address ends with 'God laughs when he sees me thinking,' an ironic self-deflation. Yet large stretches of the book are earnest philosophical argument and passionate advocacy for the European novel, delivered without the sustained gap between surface and meaning that defines Nabokov or Conrad.
Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
Kundera explicitly resists closure on the novel's future ('I don't know'), refuses to predict 'the future paths of the novel,' and frames the book's central concept as 'the wisdom of uncertainty.' The essay on Cervantes argues that the novel's value lies in refusing the 'either-or' of definitive judgment, and the Kafka essay ends by circling back to mystery rather than settling on an explanation. The 'Sixty-three Words' section replaces linear argument with a dictionary form that scatters meaning across alphabetical entries, resisting any final synthesis. Yet each individual essay does arrive at strong positions — on kitsch, on the Kafkan, on the novel's morality — giving the reader considerable intellectual footing.
Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
The book deploys seven distinct formal modes: historical essay, interview-dialogue, analytical notes on another novelist, a second dialogue on composition, a critical essay on Kafka, an alphabetical dictionary of 63 terms, and a public speech. Kundera explicitly theorizes this heterogeneity, comparing it to novelistic polyphony and musical counterpoint. The 'Sixty-three Words' section is particularly inventive, fragmenting sustained argument into cross-referenced dictionary entries. Still, within each part the prose moves linearly and lucidly, there are no timeline disruptions or unreliable perspectives, and the overall arc from Cervantes through Kafka to a defense of the novel's future is legible and progressive.

How The Art of the Novel is regarded

The Art of the Novel holds a literary regard score of 80 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

What The Art of the Novel asks you to hold together

The Art of the Novel sustains Metasystematic (13) on the Model of Hierarchical Complexity: constellations compared. Its highest passage reaches the same stage on pages 116–119. Read from the full text, all 76 passages. What the stages mean.

Where The Art of the Novel sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (76 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Art of the Novel scores 80 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
Schweik and his companions go to the front without knowing why and, what is even more shocking, without caring to know.
Symbol: Formal
A theme is an existential inquiry. And increasingly I realize that such an inquiry is, finally, the examination of certain words, theme-words.
Mythos: Irony and Satire III (Satire of High Norm) (irony iii)
Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling.
Genre: Anatomy + Confession
The great prose form in which an author thoroughly explores, by means of experimental selves (characters), some themes of existence.

Where the story of The Art of the Novel takes place

  • Europe's novel from Cervantes to the 1980s (1605 to 1985), the main setting
  • Broch's Germany of The Sleepwalkers, 1888-1918 (1888 to 1918)
  • Communist Prague and Czechoslovakia, 1950s-1980s (1950 to 1985)

6 things that are true of The Art of the Novel, with the passage for each

  1. The book was assembled from seven pieces written, published or spoken between 1979 and 1985.

    The seven pieces comprising this book were written, published, or spoken before an audience between 1979 and 1985.

  2. Kundera analyses the tempo of Life Is Elsewhere by counting chapters per page.

    You see: Part Five has 96 pages and only 11 chapters; a slow, tranquil pace: moderato. Part Four has 25 chapters in 30 pages!

  3. Kundera cites a true story of a Prague engineer who returns from London to find a newspaper saying he defected, and then actually emigrates.

    A Czech engineer, attending a conference in London, has made a slanderous statement about his socialist homeland to the Western press and has decided to stay in the West.

  4. He imagines Philip Roth casting the Marx Brothers in The Castle.

    Philip Roth’s imagined film version of The Castle: Groucho Marx plays the Land-Surveyor K., with Chico and Harpo as the two assistants.

  5. The dictionary entry 'Octavio' is called the forty-ninth of the sixty-three words, added after the Mexico City earthquake.

    And I make his dear, dear name the forty-ninth of these sixty-three words.

  6. The Jerusalem Address defines the novel as the echo of God's laughter, from a Jewish proverb.

    There is a fine Jewish proverb: Man thinks, God laughs.

Scenes in The Art of the Novel that Frye would name

16 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anatomy, Sixty-three Words
So write your own personal dictionary. A dictionary for your novels. Put down your key words, your problem words, the words you love. . . .” An alphabetical encyclopedic dictionary is the anatomy form in its purest shape.
Epos, Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe
It pleases me to think that the art of the novel came into the world as the echo of God’s laughter. The closing prize address is oratory delivered to a live audience.
Demonic imagery, Somewhere Behind
All three are in a world that is nothing but a single, huge labyrinthine institution they cannot escape and cannot understand. The Kafkan labyrinth is the book's central demonic image.
Alazon, Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe
Never having heard God’s laughter, the agélastes are convinced that the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are. The agélaste is the self-certain impostor whom comic wisdom deflates.
Eiron, Notes Inspired by “The Sleepwalkers”
He amuses himself, he amuses other people, and by his extravagant conformism, he turns the world into one enormous joke. Schweik is the self-effacing unraveler of stupid power.
Anatomy, Dialogue on the Art of Composition
Polyphony in the novel is much more poetry than it is technique. Catalogues of a novel's heterogeneous lines (anecdote, essay, fable) show the anatomy's encyclopedic mixing.

Books that share these scenes with The Art of the Novel

About the author

Milan Kundera