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Milan Kundera, The Art of Fiction No. 81

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  Milan Kundera , The Art of Fiction No. 81 Interviewed by Christian Salmon Issue 92, Summer 1984 Milan Kundera, ca. 1980. Photograph by Elisa Cabot This interview is a product of several encounters with Milan Kundera in Paris in the fall of 1983. Our meetings took place in his attic apartment near Montparnasse. We worked in the small room that Kundera uses as his office. With its shelves full of books on philosophy and musicology, an old-fashioned typewriter and a table, it looks more like a student’s room than like the study of a world-famous author. On one of the walls, two photographs hang side by side: one of his father, a pianist, the other of Leoš Janácek, a Czech composer whom he greatly admires. We held several free and lengthy discussions in French; instead of a tape recorder, we used a typewriter, scissors, and glue. Gradually, amid discarded scraps of paper and after several revisions, this text emerged. This interview was conducted soon after Kundera’s most recent book...
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Arthur Koestler, The Art of Fiction No. 80

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  Arthur Koestler , The Art of Fiction No. 80 Interviewed by Duncan Fallowell Issue 92, Summer 1984 Arthur Koestler, ca. 1996. Photograph by Eric Koch   The Koestler drawing room is predominantly green with deep green walls. It has an Empire flavor, and there are interesting pieces of Egyptian sculpture in it. On the coffee table are Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn and The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics .   Koestler is wearing the costume of the old Left—rough materials tending to light rather than dark, in his case to greenish, with nothing matching anything else: checked shirt, wool cardigan, tartan tie, tweed jacket, et cetera. Sitting very uneasily in a pool of lamplight, Arthur Koestler seemed low. His wife, Cynthia, had opened the front door of their house in London’s Montpelier Square. A gentle, soft, sad woman wearing no makeup, she had explained that Mr. Koestler was not at his best; he was recovering from a “viral infection,” which is how...
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