SOURCE: "Beautifying Lies and Polyphonic Wisdom," in New York Times Book Review, April 10, 1988, p. 13.

In the following review of The Art of the Novel, Meisel focuses on Kundera's treatment of formal devices of the novel genre.

Milan Kundera has charmed the world with his sonorous fictions—five novels, a play and a volume of stories-although it is formalist rigor as much as charm that distinguishes his first book of nonfiction, The Art of the Novel. A collection of five essays and two dialogues published over the last decade, The Art of the Novel recommends self-effacement as a precept of writing and dooms purveyors of dogma in either literature or criticism. Whatever moral arrangements the Czechoslovak subjects of his narratives might suggest to us, Mr. Kundera as critic is little inclined to dwell upon them. Instead, he dispassionately explains—and with singular instructiveness, as he ranges from Cervantes and...