A brilliant exploration of the novel - its history and its art - from one of the genre's most distinguished practitioners.
'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 the curtain. The world opened before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.' For Kundera, that curtain represents the 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 deftly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilisation. 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, Gracia Marquez 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 skilfully describes how the best novels do that.
Industry Reviews
A celebrated Franco-Czech novelist considers the history of the novel and worries about its future.Kundera (Ignorance, 2002, etc.) begins by observing that there were no novels until stories began to have aesthetic value. One of the novel's principal functions, he claims, is to explore the prose of life. "All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it," he writes. Kundera repeatedly considers literary history, and he shows how the past has influenced the present. Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Trial, Ulysses-these and other celebrated works are mined throughout for their explanatory and illustrative riches. Kundera believes that readers of literature must be readers of comparative literature: to read only those works that mirror your own culture and language is to intentionally blind yourself. Kundera alludes to novels and novelists from all over the word (though most are European men). He explains the title of his book in its fourth section: Novelists must devote themselves to "tearing the curtain of preinterpretation." This section also features something of a rant against pop fiction; Kundera labels "contemptible" those writers who create repetitive fictions that deal with the ephemeral. In later sections, he offers some insights on the pervasiveness of human stupidity and bureaucracy, and he ends with eloquent passages about our separation from the past-how forgetting and memory, which transforms rather than records, make more difficult the novelist's task.On bright display are Kundera's vast reading, his passion for his art and his disdain for the ordinary. (Kirkus Reviews)
