TRANSPARENCY PA

Milan Kundera on Marek Bieczyk's Transparency: The subject of transparency has always interested me; in The Art of the Novel I discussed it as one of the key words in my personal lexicon. Marek Bieczyk is right to give it an entire book of its own: transparency remains one of the foundational concepts of today's social imaginary, and its role never ceases to grow. These lovely pages, in which the essay brushes up against fiction, offer us more than an historical and philosophical study, but a truly existential, and thus novelistic, investigation of transparency. It's a delight. Drawing on all his resources as a novelist, cultural critic, and scholar, Marek Bieczyk peels away the layers of our contemporary obsession with transparency, skipping across centuries and continents to piece together the genesis of our fears of deception and overexposure.