Rencontre. (English) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Characters/People edit see section history

• Franz Kafka: Add a description of this character.
• Samuel Beckett
• Gamelin
• Igor Stravinsky
• Jack Hamilton
• Fellini
• Arthur Rimbaud
• Schoenberg
• Bacon
• Janácˇek
• Depestre
• Apollinaire
• Aragon
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Philip Roth
• Louis-Ferdinand Celine
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Francis Bacon
• Bertolt Brecht
• Juan Goytisolo

Quotes edit see section history

• “I could put it differently: Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?”

• “The acceleration of history has profoundly transformed individual lives that, in centuries past, used to proceed from birth to death within a single historical period; today a life straddles two such periods, sometimes more. Whereas history used to advance far more slowly than human life, nowadays it is history that moves fast, it tears ahead, it slips from a man's grasp, and the continuity, the identity, of a life is in danger of cracking apart. So the novelist feels the need to keep within reach, alongside our own way of life, the memory of the bashful and half forgotten one our predecessors lived.”

• “After this exploration of time, we can understand God's remark to him: "Even though you were engendered by a drop of sprem, and I was manufactured out of speculation and doctrinal Councils, still the two of us share something: non-existence."”

• “I was rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude when a strange idea occurred to me: most protagonists of great novels do not have children. Scarcely 1 percent of the world's population are childless, but at least 50 percent of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced<....> This infertility is not due to a conscious purpose of the novelists; it is the spirit of the art of the novel (or its subconscious) that spurns procreation.)”

• “In my native country, as people were shedding their ideological illusions, the 'Gamelin mystery' ceased to interest them. A bastard is a bastard, what's the mystery? The existential enigma has disappeared behind political certitude, and certitudes don't give a damn about enigmas. This is why, despite the wealth of their lived experiences, people emerge from a historic ordeal still just as stupid as they were when they went into it.”

• “If I told you that Matisse was a second-rate painter, it would take you no more than fifteen minutes in a museum to see that I'm a fool. But how could one reread all of Conrad? It would take weeks! The different arts reach our brains in different ways; they lodge there with differing ease, at different speeds, with different degrees of inevitable simplification; and for different durations. We talk about the history of literature, we claim connection to it, convinced we know it, but what, *concretely*, is the history of literature in the common memory? A patchwork of fragmentary images that, by pure chance, each of thousands of readers has stitched together for himself. Beneath the hole-ridden sky of such a vaporous, illusory memory, we are all at the mercy of blacklists, of their arbitrary, untestable verdicts, and always ready to ape their stupid elegance.”

• “The war's closing moments bring out a truth that is both fundamental and banal, both eternal and disregarded: compared with the living, the dead have an overwhelming numerical superiority, not just the dead of this war's end but all the dead of all times, the dead of the past, the dead of the future; confident in their superiority, they mock us, they mock this little island of time we live in , this tiny time of the new Europe, they force us to grasp all its insignificance, all its transience. ...”

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Central Europe
• Paris
• Prague
• Martinique
• Naples
• America
• Czechoslovakia
• Solibo
• Ukraine
• Africa
• Russia

First Sentence edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

Other Contributors:

1. Milan Kundera

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 100

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Nonfiction › Foreign Language Nonfiction › French
• Books › Nonfiction › Philosophy

Books Cited by This Book edit see section history