The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts [Paperback]

Kundera is a 'thinking novelist' one who constantly reflects on his art, and whose reflections often enter into the very body of his fiction. In this seven- part analysis he tries to draw back the curtain and provide us a look at the essence of the novel. The novel which Lawrence called 'the bright book of life' is the form which had its first great manifestation in the Western World in Cervantes 'Quixote'. Kundera provides a brief historical survey of the novel. He argues for its being a foundation element of world- literature. He too argues that our well- worn habit of speaking of American fiction, English fiction, Russian fiction does a disservice to the form which is aimed to speak at our essential humanity, across all boundaries. Kundera tells us how the Novel first began to give everyday life its full place in our consciousness. He speaks of the way the nineteenth century novel of psychological character analysis moved into the twentieth century 'novel of situation', He provides us insight into those who are in his perception the greats of the genre Cervantes, Tolstoy , Dostoevsky, Proust, Laclos, Stendhal, Broch , Musil, Kafka. He argues against fiction which is meant to be a trivial entertaintment and in effect claims that what the Novel really is is the most essential way of telling and understanding Life. He argues for an Art which is essential and enduring, clearly having his own personal aspirations for his own work in mind.

All who love Fiction will be instructed by this master's insightful and often surprising essay on the most significant literary form of our time.

Milan Kundera is best known for his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which chronicles the fragile nature of an individual's fate. The author offers a nihilistic view of life in which there is no possibility of repetition, experiment, or trial and error.

Nevertheless, the author finds meaning, however fleeting, in humanity's creative urges. Not only has he written a long list of fictional works, but he has penned several volumes of literary criticism, including 1980's The Art of the Novel.

In his new work, The Curtain, Kundera continues this investigation into the novel--its raison d'etre; its strengths and weaknesses; its history, power, and purposes; how it differs from other literary genres.

For Kundera, "the curtain" represents the burden or weight of pre-interpretation inherited from the past. The great novelist, he asserts, breaks through this curtain of misperceptions, discovering or even inventing what lies beyond, thereby revealing something new about the human condition.

Kundera points out that Cervantes' Don Quixote, like Francois Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, stands at the very beginning of the novel's birth, and that both of these works display an original version of human nature. This is what makes a novel matter: its ability to reveal some previously unrecognized aspect of our existence.

This truth is exemplified in the works of Franz Kafka, who, along with Miguel Cervantes, receives the lion's share of Kundera's analysis in The Curtain. Kafka ripped through the curtain in his novels, exposing the oppressive nature of the modern bureaucratic state and the destructiveness of the totalitarian mentality.

But Kundera warns us, the novel doesn't merely serve some social purpose--its role transcends the vicissitudes of humankind.

"Art isn't there," he writes, "to be some great mirror registering all of History's ups and downs, variations, endless repetitions...It is there to create its own history."

In other words, a great novel has, in addition to existential depth, an aesthetic value. In breaking through the curtain, it escapes provincialism, which Kundera defines as "the inability (or the refusal) to see one's own culture in the large context," and merges with the greater current of world history.

The Curtain--Milan Kundera's deeply considered personal vision of what the novel can and should be, a vision privileged by the unique perspective of a writer who has spent much of his life apart from his Czech homeland--provides an artistic, intelligent feast.

Reading THE CURTAIN is akin to what I would imagine it would be like to hear Kundera lecture to a small group about literature. The tone is really quite intimate. His prose incredibly lucid (as always) and his ideas are so clear.