[In the review below, Hutchinson addresses the main themes of Testaments Betrayed.]

In 1979, while interviewing Milan Kundera for Corriere della Serra, the essayist Alain Finkielkraut remarked on how Mr. Kundera's style—"flowery, baroque"—in his first novel, The Joke, had become spare and limpid in his later books. Flowery? Baroque? On examining the French edition of The Joke, Mr. Kundera discovered that his translator had sown the book with metaphors. "The sky was blue"? No: "A periwinkle October sky hoisted its sumptuous colors on the masthead." This outlandish piece of literary embroidery was then used as the source text for the Argentine edition, among others. Nor did the book fare any better with Mr. Kundera's original English publisher, who helpfully edited out all the reflexive passages, along with the chapters on musicology, and then changed the order of the various parts. Few writers can have been quite so unfortunate in their appointed go-betweens. But Mr. Kundera had learned his lesson: as a note tells us at the end of the revised French translation of The Joke, he now devotes almost as much time to overseeing foreign editions of his work as he does to writing.

A writer's work can be betrayed in many ways. The French edition of Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs rearranges her furious, rambling prose into three tidy volumes according to theme, utterly destroying the mnemonic logic that binds the narrative together. Auden, who removed a whole article of "verbose rubbish" from his version of Goethe's Italian Journey on the grounds that it did not represent Goethe's views, has himself come back to life as the author of a pamphlet of love poems for adolescents. The preface to a new edition of Ulysses tries to turn Joyce, the most internationally minded of writers, whose alter ego coined one of the most damning remarks ever made about history, into a kind of closet Irish nationalist. The greater the work, the greater the wealth of connotation; to simplify is always to betray.

An essay in nine parts, Testaments Betrayed is in many respects a continuation of The Art of the Novel and, like all of Mr. Kundera's books, is organized along musical lines, each section being both a variation on the title theme and an essay that is itself composed of variations of its own. Many of the themes taken up in the earlier work are here fleshed out in further detail: the art of narrative, the novel as the outrider of modernity, the morality of irony, the confusions of an age obsessed by ideas and indifferent to work and, of course, to the hazards of translation (his own translator here, Linda Asher, has nothing to fear). The book ranges widely, with a cast that includes both writers and musicians—Rabelais, Rushdie, Mann, Musil, Broch, Bach, Janacek, Stravinsky, Kafka and Mr. Kundera himself. It is a defense of fiction and a lesson in the art of reading.

About Rabelais and the invention of humor: humor, says Mr. Kundera, quoting Octavio Paz, is the great invention of the modern spirit, a species of the comic that renders ambiguous everything it touches. The source of that humor is the novel, and the ambiguity it breeds, its refusal to pass judgment, is the novel's morality. The Rights of Man? Prior to the novel, the individual in the modern sense simply didn't exist. The arts had first of all to invent him. For Mr. Kundera, this is of the essence: from Rabelais and Cervantes on, the rise of the novel and the rise of modern society are one, and failure to grasp this reduces the novel to a form of polite entertainment or, what is just as bad, to an ideological skeleton hung with the author's rags.

All of Mr. Kundera's novels are carnivals of misunderstanding, and there is hardly a character in his fiction who doesn't at some stage betray someone or something—husband, wife, family, colleagues, country, ideals. The thematic overlap with the essays is striking, yet there is an important difference: the kind of misrepresentations and betrayals Mr. Kundera explores in his novels are part of the human predicament, a category of existence the author sees as inseparable from modern society—lacking the finished text for our lives, having no certain knowledge as to what the "right" decision might be, we can only take our esthetic instinct for a guide and improvise. But in the testaments he examines in his essays, it is man's works, not his days, that are at stake, and here we do indeed have the finished text, the musical score.

The writer whose work best embodies the thrust of Mr. Kundera's argument is Kafka, whose work, he suggests, has been betrayed on several fronts. His French translators, for example, have destroyed the rhythm of his prose by punctuating his long sentences with semicolons and chopping his paragraphs up into a whole host of shorter ones. (In manuscript the third chapter of The Castle consists of just two long paragraphs; in Max Brod's edition there are four, in one French translation a mind-boggling ninety-five, and Mr. Kundera devotes a whole section to comparing three translations of a long sentence in The Castle before providing his own.) Next come those publishers who, despite Kafka's insistence that his books be printed in large type, chose typefaces so small they must have ruined the eyes of more than one reader. Above all, there are critics who, rather than address the novels' particular achievement within the larger context of European fiction, prefer to immerse themselves in hagiography and speculations about the author's private life. Mr. Kundera is particularly severe on Brod, whom he holds responsible for Kafka's disastrous metamorphosis from novelist into saint; to illustrate this collapse of critical priorities, he cites an essay taken "at random" in which the letters are quoted fifty-four times, the diaries forty-five, the Janouch Conversations thirty-five, the stories twenty, The Trial five, The Castle four and Amerika not once.

Inevitably, this book has its weak moments. There are times when he seems to want to read Kafka for erotic comedy alone, and some of his arguments about the relations between politics and art are shaky. (Blaming the Romantic tradition and all things "lyrical" for the horrors of totalitarianism is as much of a simplification as the kind of reasoning he denounces in the debate surrounding Heidegger's involvement with the Nazi Party.) And though I understand his despair at the sheer volume of noise surrounding our lives, he should avoid writing about rock music, which, as readers of his novels will have noticed, invariably brings out some of his worst prose.

But these are quibbles. Mr. Kundera's essays should be placed alongside those of that other great emigre, Joseph Brodsky, the one performing for fiction what the other has done for poetry and both men sharing a now-unfashionable belief in the importance of esthetics to ethics. Mr. Kundera, for whom our passion for passing judgment before we have even begun to understand is a sure sign of our depravity, feels that art, by leading us into the labyrinth, can lead us out. He thinks that if we could come to terms with this the world would be a better place. He may well be right.