The Curtain - Essays (Paperback, Main)

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)

In this entertaining and stimulating essay, one of world literature's most distinctive thinkers sets out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. Too often, Kundera suggests, a novel is thought about only within the confines of the language and nation of its origin, when in fact what makes a novel matter is its ability to reveal some previously unknown aspect of our existence. Kundera describes how the best novels, from Don Quixote to Ulysses and Madame Bovary to The Trial, do just that.

General

Imprint:	Faber and Faber
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	March 2007
Authors:	Milan Kundera
Translators:	Linda Asher
Dimensions:	199 x 131 x 15mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	176
Edition:	Main
ISBN-13:	978-0-571-23281-9
Categories:	Books
LSN:	0-571-23281-7
Barcode:	9780571232819

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