Synopses & Reviews
"A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world," writes Milan Kundera in
The Curtain, his fascinating new book on the art of the novel. "Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose." For Kundera, that curtain represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides.
In this entertaining and always stimulating essay, Kundera cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. Too often, he suggests, a novel is thought about only within the confines of the language and nation of its origin, when in fact the novel's development has always occurred across borders: Laurence Sterne learned from Rabelais, Henry Fielding from Cervantes, Joyce from Flaubert, García Márquez from Kafka. The real work of a novel is not bound up in the specifics of any one language: what makes a novel matter is its ability to reveal some previously unknown aspect of our existence. In The Curtain, Kundera skillfully describes how the best novels do just that.
Review
"[Kundera] is one of the most erudite novelists on the planet. Not since Henry James, perhaps, has a fiction writer examined the process of writing with such insight, authority and range of reference and allusion." New York Times
Review
"The immediacy of Kundera's evocative prose and the rich tapestry he weaves compel us to pick up and read, or reread, the bountiful literary treasures of Western literature. This could be a book from which to draw a summer reading list." Library Journal
Review
"On bright display are Kundera's vast reading, his passion for his art and his disdain for the ordinary." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"The Curtain is not one of Kundera's best books, but to readers for whom he has provided a crucial piece of the literary puzzle, it cannot be missed." Los Angeles Times
Review
"[Kundera] argues brilliantly that this art form is the only tool we have to discover existential truths hidden by the high fly of philosophy or the self-delusions of lyric poetry." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Written in aphoristic style, The Curtain is agreeably studded with insights that may have been overlooked even by veteran readers of the novel." Wall Street Journal
Synopsis
Traces the author's personal view of the history and significance of the novel in western civilization, arguing that a novel's development crosses international and language boundaries while serving to reveal previously unknown aspects of a reader's existence. By the author of The Art of the Novel. 35,000 first printing.
Synopsis
"An elegant, personalized integration of anecdote, analysis, scholarship, memory and speculation. . . . Not since Henry James, perhaps, has a fiction writer examined the process of writing with such insight, authority and range of reference and allusion." --Russell Banks, New York Times Book Review
"A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose."
In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the art of the novel, renowned author Milan Kundera suggests that "the curtain" represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has--a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides.
Here an incomparable literary artist cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. In doing so, he celebrates a prose form that possesses the unique ability to transcend national and language boundaries in order to reveal some previously unknown aspect of human existence.
About the Author
The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.