Product Description

“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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #71560 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-13
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .44" h x 5.36" w x 7.98" l, .30 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. It's not often that a work comes along that so perfectly distills an approach to art that it realigns the way an art form is understood. Susan Sontag's revolutionary work On Photography was one such piece. Kundera's new book-length essay should be another. The renowned Franco-Czech author (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) investigates the history of the novel, beginning with the moment in which Cervantes denied Don Quixote's desire for elevation to knight-errant and instead "cast a legendary figure down: into the world of prose." In the prosaic world, according to Kundera, the absence of pathos, the insistence on the comedic and the interrelation of all novels represent the locus of meaning and emotional impact. Kundera argues against the tendency to classify and study literature through the lens of nationality. Instead, he proposes a world literature that would take into account the way novelists learn from one another, Sterne from Rabelais, Fielding from Cervantes, Joyce from Flaubert and, though he never explicitly states it, Kundera from them all. This is a self-consciously personal vision of "the poetics of the novel," one that displays Kundera's own preoccupations, from his Central European dislike of sentimental kitsch to his exhortation that, to be counted in the history of the novel, all novelists must follow Cervantes, must "[tear] the curtain of preinterpretation" into which we are all born. Only then can the novel accomplish its purpose: to show its readers their own lives. (Feb.)
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Review
“Brilliant, vehement, learned and wise…Stimulating and provocative…THE CURTAIN raises essential questions.” (Salon.com )

“A swiftly told, beautifully crafted, pleasurable...scrutiny of the novel ...To Mr. Kundera, the novel is a liberating force.” (The Economist )

“Kundera…argues brilliantly…Discarding chronology, Kundera lets us witness the inner workings of his....wonderful reader’s mind.” (Cecile Alduy, San Francisco Chronicle )

“Kundera’s essay so perfectly distilles an approach to art that it realigns the way an art form is understood.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review) )

“An elegant, personalized integration of anecdote, analysis, scholarship, memory and speculation...Kundera’s opinions...are well worth listening to.” (Russell Banks, New York Times Book Review )

“Kundera offers witty and edifying improvisations on…favorite themes…Anyone interested in the novel will delight in this book.” (Alec Solomita, New York Sun )

“Essential reading in a long history of debates about the genre...Wise, deep, and witty.” (New York Review of Books )

“As the French expression goes, Kundera always gives you furiously to think…[He] writes…with passion.” (Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World )

“Well-worth reading…witty and brisk and very smart, like all of [Kundera’s] writing.” (William Deresiewicz, The Nation )

“A work of sophisticated literary cartography…agreeably studded with insights.” (Joseph Epstein, Wall Street Journal )

“Bursting at the seams with ideas…Kundera dashes irrepressibly around his own studio...to consistently fascinating effect. A rare pleasure.” (Steven Poole, New Statesman )

“Lovely, meandering observations on the genre to which he has consecrated his life…Like good love stories, it pulls you in.” (Philadelphia Inquirer )

“Evocative...Kundera marvelously conducts us on a journey through the history of the novel.” (Library Journal )

“Kundera is assuredly one of the great living writers…This is a remarkable book….Absorbing and sometimes sublime.” (Buffalo News )

About the Author

The Franco-Czech novelist and critic 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, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves—all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.