The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts [Hardcover]

Milan Kundera (Author), Linda Asher (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0060841869 | ISBN-13: 978-0060841867 | Publication Date: January 30, 2007 | Edition: 1st

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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

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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From Bookmarks Magazine

Milan Kundera states that the novelist's primary goal "is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say." Ironically, many critics observed that Kundera covers much the same ground as he did in The Art of the Novel (1986) and Testaments Betrayed (1995), though they also mentioned that his views have softened somewhat toward authors and trends he had previously condemned. Most reviewers found his writing clear and accessible despite its erudite subject matter and praised Linda Asher's skillful translation for preserving the writer's linguistic idiosyncrasies. Perhaps the greatest value of The Curtain is the insight gained into Kundera's own novels as he explains his personal philosophy of writing and reading.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (January 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060841869
• ISBN-13: 978-0060841867
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #835,991 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Milan Kundera, born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, was a student when the Czech Communist regime was established in 1948, and later worked as a labourer, jazz musician and professor at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Prague. After the Russian invasion in August 1968, his books were proscribed. In 1975, he and his wife settled in France, and in 1981, he became a French citizen. 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 of the short-story collection Laughable Loves - all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity and Ignorance, as well as his non-fiction works The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The credo of a modern master, February 7, 2007

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (Hardcover)

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.

29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Kundera continues his investigation of the novel, February 25, 2007

By 

Roy E. Perry "amateur philosopher" (Nolensville, Tennessee) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (Hardcover)

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.

22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rewarding and thought-provoking read..., February 13, 2007

By 

JR Pinto (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (Hardcover)

This is billed as an essay in seven parts. I don't know how true that is because an essay should have a unifying thesis. This book is more like a meditation. The subject of the meditation? Art, history, politics...but mostly the novel. The title of the book reflects the way the world comes at us pre-interpreted. It is the job of the novel to tear through this curtain and see the world in a new way (he is obviously a fan of phenomenology).

Kundera has many points to make about the novel, so it would be a disservice to try to sum them up. He asserts that tracing literature through individual countries is wrong - novelists know no nationalities. As in his own novels, Kundera is obsessed with the idea of kitsch. For him, Kitsch is the ultimate enemy of Art. I think he uses "kitsch" to mean mawkishness. I don't know if I ultimately agree with him - I appreciate some good kitsch now and again - but it is a useful concept to keep in mind when reading Kundera's novels; he is fond of humor because it is the enemy of kitsch.

He goes on in some detail about the importance of humor. Yet, I wouldn't call this a tremendously uplifting read. He is convinced that Art and the Novel are dying. In our "consumer society" we are satisfied at having the world pre-digested for us. We can only hope that he is wrong.