Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with Rene Girard

Trevor Cribben Merrill offers a bold reassessment of Milan Kundera''s place in the contemporary canon. Harold Bloom and others have dismissed the Franco-Czech author as a maker of “period pieces” that lost currency once the Berlin Wall fell. Merrill refutes this view, revealing a previously unexplored dimension of Kundera''s fiction. Building on theorist René Girard''s notion of “triangular desire...