Kundera, or, The Memory of Desire

``Kundera or The Memory of Desire offers hope to all those who still care about aesthetics.'' -- Marguerite Andersen, Canadian Book Review Annual -- 200502
``Eva Le Grand...is a professor, that is to say she is assigned in principle to inscribe literature in a pedagogical framework -- and yet, as this work shows brilliantly, nothing could be more alien to her than the current practice of rendering literature sterile. It is this, as much as her perfect knowledge of the slightest aspect of the work in question, and the exceptional complicity she obviously maintains with it, which for me constitutes the most important quality of her essay: nothing of Kundera's extraordinary insolence is erased, not even the most scatalogical motifs of his novels..., her mastery of the power of dis-idealization of these motifs is complete... One cannot imagine...a better incentive to read (or re-read) Kundera than this essay: it expresses, in all its nonconformity, a pleasure which Eva Le Grand renders irresistibly contagious.'' -- from the Foreword by Guy Scarpetta