The Curtain

“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.

In this profound meditation on his art, Kundera explores what only the novel can say:

• The Art of the Novel: A defense of the novel as an autonomous art with its own history and morality, whose sole purpose is discovery beyond the curtain of pre-interpretation.
• A History of European Literature: A personal journey through the centuries, from Cervantes and Rabelais to Flaubert and Tolstoy, tracing the evolution of fiction as a relay race between nations.
• Modernism in Fiction: An insightful analysis of the great Central European modernists—Kafka, Broch, Musil, and Gombrowicz—and their creation of a great, antilyrical poetry of the novel.
• Aesthetics and Existence: A brilliant examination of concepts like kitsch, humor, and the tragic, revealing them not as abstract ideas but as keys to understanding human life.