A perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize, the Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera has written a witty meditation on the history of the novel. “The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors,” he argues, “but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.” And in his loving reflections on Cervantes, Sterne, Flaubert, Tolstory, Joyce, Musil, and others he reveals that in the history of literature, a history of values instead of events, we may discover provisional answers to the timeless questions: Where do we come from? Why are we here? What is the meaning of it all? This is Kundera's sixth book written in French, and his increasingly supple use of his second language will make readers long for his next novel.