Milan Kundera

Traces the author's personal view of the history and significance of the novel in western civilization, arguing that a novel's development crosses international and language boundaries while serving to reveal previously unknown aspects of a reader's existence. By the author of The Art of the Novel. 35,000 first printing.

An Essay in Seven Parts

The Curtain

Trever

I like Kundera but his ideas are, as he feels is the novelist's point, untenable, which makes this a little irritating, considering it's just ideas, without the great writing and story to back it up.

Sol Kang

Gustav Vallin

In this entertaining and always stimulating collection of seven essays, Kundera deftly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel. Too often, he suggests, a novel is thought about only within the confines of the 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.

The Curtain An Essay in Seven Parts

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