Milan Kundera’s last book was non-fiction. His last novel about the impossibility of the Odyssian return to one’s homeland, written in the wake of the collapse of Communism, was published way back in 2002. When Encounter was announced late last year, for a moment it seemed that the Czech maestro was returning to fiction after eight years. In every way ‘Encounter’ was a very apt name to follow his mono-worded titles (originally in French) Slowness (1997) and Identity (1998). But no, it was not to be. Encounter, which has the word ‘Essays’ accompanying the title boldly, follows his 2007 release The Curtain — which was his third instalment on the novel form (though no less meditative and evocative than his novels) after Art of the Novel (1986) and Testaments Betrayed (1992).

In that sense, Encounter would have to be the fourth instalment of Kundera’s extended mediation on the Novel — a form that he defines as an essentially a complex, consummate and comical enterprise. The novel, for Kundera, has attained forms and scope that was never manifest in the founding works by Frenchman Rabelais and Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes. Yet, in the open-ended, peerless anatomy of both Pentagruel and Don Quixote, lay pregnant the huge possibilities that helped the novel’s future procurators to tear open the curtain of consciousness — especially the Latin American masters of the 20th Century as well as their Central European counterparts, whom Kundera, in an interview, calls the ‘pleiad’ of great novelists (Kafka, Broch, Musil, Gombrowicz). In the same interview, however, Kundera makes it clear that for him the European Novel encompasses, within its walls, everything between Cervantes and Faulkner and he considers the ‘pleiad’ that aesthetic roof under which he has made his home.

Some of these motifs, central to the books on the novel, resurface in Encounter. But Encounter is not a successor of any of the previous installments on the novel. Encounter stands on its own as Kundera’s ode to the century past, an elegy to a Europe he grew up in and had learnt to feel at home in, a sunset rhapsody to the great minds whose consummate and collective passion stood guard against Europe’s inevasible descent into darkness.

Encounter collects several essays loosely connected under chapters and none of them pretending to make any definitive comment on the object of analysis. And that is why they are never, even for a second, boring. His is the exact counterpoint to the burdensome, top-heavy, pretentious academic essay because Kundera looks at his objects of analysis as one looks at his objects of desire. As if, he is looking at precious souvenirs in his collection — made of pens and inks, trumpets and cellos, palettes and brush — and takes turns to talk about each of them in an endearing, almost whispering way. And in each case, he tells a tale that is not just full of uncommon insight but also effortless erudition. Each little essay is as if coalesced from years of engagement and reading — an act Kundera aptly calls ‘encounter’. Kundera here is a proto-collector of Europe’s great past and its endless roaster of great novelists, painters, musicians and poets. Encounter is that moment when, as an engaged missionary on the search for the soul of the European Novel, Kundera stumbles upon an assorted gallery of other belongings no less intricate. He is both happy and sad. Happy to be able to look closely at an unrivalled legacy but sad that he could see the legacy most clearly only under the dying light of the day.

And dying light it is. Because the Europe that Kundera grew up in is surely on the way out. This is a Europe, he says, that no longer recognizes its Anatole France, no longer remembers its Leoš Janásek, no longer stops to read its Curzio Malaparte. It is a Europe that is as foreign to Dostoevsky as it is alien to Schoenberg and Brecht, more surreal perhaps than the Surrealists were to a generation of aesthetes. In the last two hundred years, Europe has reshaped itself again and again — during the French Revolution, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and with the beginning and end of Cold War. But throughout it has been connected by an unseen but illumined light of consciousness, of awareness, of interrogation of the fundamental assumptions. All that seems to be on the way out forever.

In Encounter, there is no hard mention of Europe’s passing into a dry age of collective commerce under Europa but the tone of sadness and fin de siècle apprehension is all too apparent. Kundera is not mourning loudly. He is chatting while waiting for the inevitable darkness to set in — the darkness that he has already named; not in his books about fiction but in his last book of fiction in 2002. And it was called Ignorance.