The Collected Stories (essays) / The Art of the Novel

The collection is openly uneven piece to piece: one reader says only the Kafka essay earns its place and the rest is skippable, and the essay built around Broch's Sleepwalkers trilogy loses anyone who hasn't read that specific novel, the section most often admitted as skimmed. The Sixty-Three Words glossary splits opinion too, a highlight for some and dismissed by others as filler dictionary entries next to the sustained essays around it. Tone draws its own complaints: readers reach for “too full of himself, too opinionated and haughty” to describe Kundera's certainty about his own taste, and note the frame is “also Eurocentric and subjective, with a heavy emphasis” on his preferred lineage. A critic's version of the same charge: he “flourishes his cleverness like a matador's cape.”