"….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 Richardson to Kafka, Joyce and Hermann Broch -how novels are made and why; how the novel and its history constitute a specific form of knowledge not to be confused with philosophy, politics or psychology; and why novels are and should be written at all. Linda Asher's translation from the French deftly conveys the lucidity of Mr. Kundera's prose.

The emphasis on the formal aspects of fiction in ''The Art of the Novel'' is accompanied by an overt disavowal of any political agenda. Disingenuous as such a claim may sound coming from an Eastern European writer living in exile in Paris, it is nonetheless the first of three working principles in ''The Art of the Novel.'' Mr. Kundera bases it on his belief in ''the radical autonomy of the novel'' as a form, as he puts it in his essay on Kafka, ''Somewhere Behind.''

The second principle is derived from the first, and it is the rejection of kitsch. Not simply bad or laughable art, kitsch is, in Mr. Kundera's definition from ''Sixty-three Words'' (his dictionary of the terms and categories that organize his imagination), ''the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one's own reflection.''

                                          from...   BEAUTIFYING LIES AND POLYPHONIC WISDOM
                                                       - About ‘The Art Of The Novel’
                                                          by Perry Meisel (April 10, 1988)