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An Essay in Seven Parts
HarperCollins
February 2007
On Sale: January 30, 2007
176 pages
ISBN: 0060841869
EAN: 9780060841867
Hardcover
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Literature and Fiction Drama
"A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world,"
writes Milan Kundera in The Curtain, his fascinating new
book on the art of the novel. "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." For Kundera, that 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. In this entertaining and always stimulating essay, Kundera
cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and
value of the novel in Western civilization. Too often, he
suggests, a novel is thought about only within the confines
of the language and nation of its origin, when in fact the
novel's development has always occurred across borders:
Laurence Sterne learned from Rabelais, Henry Fielding from
Cervantes, Joyce from Flaubert, García Márquez from Kafka.
The real work of a novel is not bound up in the specifics of
any one language: what makes a novel matter is its ability
to reveal some previously unknown aspect of our existence.
In The Curtain, Kundera skillfully describes how the best
novels do just that.
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