Commiserating with Devastated Things seeks to understand the place Milan Kundera calls "e;the universe of the novel."e; Working through Kundera's oeuvre as well as the continental philosophical tradition, Wirth argues that Kundera transforms-not applies-philosophical reflection within literature.Reading between Kundera's work and his self-avowed tradition, from Kafka to Hermann Broch, Wirth asks what it might mean to insist that philosophy does not have a monopoly on wisdom, that the novel has its own modes of wisdom that challenge philosophy's.