Novels Will Save Us
“Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth.”
― Milan Kundera
On a clear April morning, I met a friend — a very cosmopolitan writer — for coffee. After a while, we wandered into a small bookstore. He was preparing a course on the Romantics and asked me for suggestions. I offered a few names, then, almost as an afterthought, asked, “Have you revisited Milan Kundera lately?”
He smiled. He had read him long ago — and loved him. Our conversation moved on, but the name stayed with me. Kundera, who wrote so deeply about memory, imagination, and uncertainty, has a way of lingering, even when not in the foreground.
The Romantics are often misread. We associate them with passion, beauty, and idealism. But many of them wrote from darker places: after failed revolutions, in the ruins of belief. Some chased transcendence, others confronted despair. They did not speak with one voice. Over time, their contradictions were flattened into simple myths. But real Romanticism was restless, unsettled, and uneasy — a spirit that runs through Kundera’s work.
Kundera was one of the twentieth century’s most important novelists and thinkers. He never received the Nobel Prize. The omission seems fitting. He distrusted official verdicts, distrusted any system that claimed final answers. His novels resist resolution. They defend contradiction.
For Kundera, the novel is Europe’s greatest invention. It is the only tradition that fully accepts human complexity without trying to simplify it. Philosophy, theology, and political theory all begin with a premise — a truth to impose. The novel begins with the individual: inconsistent, contradictory, incomplete. It does not organize life; it exposes it. Where philosophy demands coherence, religion demands faith, and politics demands loyalty, the novel makes no such demands. It creates a space where contradiction is not a flaw but a fundamental condition of being alive.
The novel, for Kundera, is not only a space for ambiguity — it is a uniquely recursive art form. Unlike painting or music, which may refine their techniques without questioning their foundations, the novel constantly redefines its own boundaries. From Don Quixote onward, the novel has been shaped by a form of intraformation — a capacity to reform itself from within. Structure, narration, chronology, even the notion of character: each generation of novelists dismantles and reassembles the form with new tensions, new freedoms. This continuous reworking is not only aesthetic; it mirrors a distinctly European mode of thought — one marked by skepticism, self-analysis, and internal critique. For Kundera, the novel is not just a cultural artifact; it is Europe’s most sophisticated thinking machine.
At the same time, the novel offers something no other form can: a deep entry into subjectivity. Not as confession, not as judgment — but as exposure. The novel slows perception, forcing the reader to inhabit the mind of another without resolving their contradictions into neat explanations. In a public sphere increasingly built on categories and reactions, the novel preserves inwardness as something complex and irreducible. For Kundera, in a Europe shaped by systems that sought to erase individual consciousness — religious, political, ideological — the novel became the last bastion of freedom.
This tradition stretches back centuries. It began with Tristan and Iseult, where love, loyalty, and destiny tear each other apart without resolution. It continued with Cervantes, who shattered certainty through irony; with Stendhal, who mapped the turbulence of ambition; with Flaubert, who exposed the collapse of dreams; with Dostoevsky, who forced good and evil into the same soul; with Proust, who charted the endless instability of memory and identity. Kundera belongs to that lineage — not by repeating it, but by continuing its defense of complexity against simplification.
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera captures the existential paradox: that life’s absence of predetermined meaning — its “lightness” — can be unbearable, yet it is also what makes freedom and creation possible. The novel’s task is not to impose meaning but to open the space where meaning might still be imagined.
Kundera’s life — shaped by censorship, exile, and disillusionment — taught him how easily freedom of thought can be destroyed. In regimes of certainty, imagination is the first thing to die. Even today, under different forms — ideological polarization, algorithmic conformity, intellectual branding — the novel remains a form of resistance: quiet, stubborn, necessary.
Novels will save us — not by answering, but by keeping alive the broken ground where thought can still wander, where nothing is mended, and where the ruin of being human is carried forward in silence.
Very beautiful!
Beautiful and profound ..