Milan Kundera, he of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Joke (that failed to amuse the Czech Communist censors), has long been in my pantheon of modern greats and remains there, despite the recent allegations made against him that he was a state spy. Well, if he was, one way or another half of Czechoslovakia was, too; not an excuse, but I've always been very wary of passing judgment on people who live under circumstances unimaginable to pampered, Western me. Anyway, what he says about writing carries the weight of his distinction as a novelist, and is well worth pondering. "Every novel created with real passion aspires quite
naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving
its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre
plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously
produced books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional – thus non-useful,
thus burdensome, thus noxious – is contemptible. This is the novelist's curse:
his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania."
