All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that great novels encompass a broad spectrum of human experiences and emotions, including both masculine and feminine perspectives.
Milan Kundera's assertion that 'all great novels, all true novels, are bisexual' implies that literature transcends traditional gender binaries and reflects the complexities of human relationships. By embracing both male and female perspectives, novels can better capture the diverse and rich tapestry of life, enabling deeper connections and understandings among readers.
In practice
In a book club discussion, one might say, 'As Kundera noted, all great novels are bisexual, reflecting the complexity of love and identity.'
Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the contrary; in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me; I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.
Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.
Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction
Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling.
Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.
After I won the Newbery Medal for 'From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,' children all over the world let me know that they liked books that take them to unusual places where they meet unusual people.
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.