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The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts Paperback – Dec 26 2007

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“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.

• Print length 168 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper Perennial
• Publication date Dec 26 2007
• Dimensions 20.27 x 13.61 x 1.12 cm
• ISBN-10 0060841958
• ISBN-13 978-0060841959
• See all details

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“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. . . Kundera’s opinions, reflections, memories and desires are well worth listening to.” — New York Times Book Review

“A work of sophisticated literary cartography. . . agreeably studded with insights.” — Wall Street Journal

“Essential reading in a long history of debates about the genre. . . . Wise, deep, and witty.” — New York Review of Books

“Kundera…argues brilliantly…Discarding chronology, [he] lets us witness the inner workings of his....wonderful reader’s mind.” — Cecile Alduy, San Francisco Chronicle

“As the French expression goes, Kundera always gives you furiously to think…[He] writes…with passion.” — Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World

“Lovely, meandering observations on the genre to which he has consecrated his life. . . . Like good love stories, it pulls you in.” — Philadelphia Inquirer

“Kundera offers witty and edifying improvisations on…favorite themes…Anyone interested in the novel will delight in this book.” — Alec Solomita, New York Sun

“Well-worth reading. . . witty and brisk and very smart, like all of [Kundera’s] writing.” — William Deresiewicz, The Nation

“A swiftly told, beautifully crafted, pleasurable. . . scrutiny of the novel. . . . To Mr. Kundera, the novel is a liberating force.” — The Economist

“Bursting at the seams with ideas. . . Kundera dashes irrepressibly around his own studio. . . to consistently fascinating effect. A rare pleasure.” — Steven Poole, New Statesman

“Kundera is assuredly one of the great living writers. . . . This is a remarkable book. . . . Absorbing and sometimes sublime.” — Buffalo News

“Brilliant, vehement, learned and wise…Stimulating and provocative…THE CURTAIN raises essential questions.” — Salon.com

“Kundera’s essay so perfectly distilles an approach to art that it realigns the way an art form is understood.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Evocative...Kundera marvelously conducts us on a journey through the history of the novel.” — Library Journal

From the Back Cover

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.

About the Author

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929 - 2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. 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 the short story collection Laughable Loves —all originally in Czech. His later novels, Slowness , Identity , Ignorance , and The Festival of Insignificance , as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel , Testaments Betrayed , The Curtain , and Encounter , were originally written in French.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (Dec 26 2007)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 168 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0060841958
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060841959
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 136 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 20.27 x 13.61 x 1.12 cm
• #228 in Literary History & Criticism Reference
• #574 in Renaissance Literary History & Criticism
• #1,084 in United States Literary History & Criticism

About the author

Milan kundera.

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.

Photo by Elisa Cabot (Flickr) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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First Chapter

‘The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts’

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By Milan Kundera

• March 4, 2007

The Consciousness of Continuity

They used to tell a story about my father, who was a musician. He is out with friends someplace when, from a radio or a phonograph, they hear the strains of a symphony.

The friends, all of them musicians or music buffs, immediately recognize Beethoven's Ninth. They ask my father, "What's that playing?" After long thought he says, "It sounds like Beethoven." They all stifle a laugh: my father doesn't recognize the Ninth Symphony! "Are you sure?" "Yes," says my father, "Late Beethoven." "How do you know it's late?" He points out a certain harmonic shift that the younger Beethoven could never have used.

The anecdote is probably just a mischievous little invention, but it does illustrate the consciousness of continuity, one of the distinguishing marks of a person belonging to the civilization that is (or was) ours. Everything, in our eyes, took on the quality of a history, seemed a more or less logical sequence of events, of attitudes, of works. From my early youth I knew the exact chronology of my favorite writers' works. Impossible to think Apollinaire could have written Alcools after Calligrammes , because if that were the case he would have been a different poet, his whole work would have a different meaning. I love each of Picasso's paintings for itself, but I also love the whole course of his work understood as a long journey whose succession of stages I know by heart. In art, the classic metaphysical questions-Where do we come from? Where are we going?-have a clear, concrete meaning, and are not at all unanswerable.

History and Value

Let us imagine a contemporary composer writing a sonata that in its form, its harmonies, its melodies resembles Beethoven's. Let's even imagine that this sonata is so masterfully made that, if it had actually been by Beethoven, it would count among his greatest works. And yet no matter how magnificent, signed by a contemporary composer it would be laughable. At best its author would be applauded as a virtuoso of pastiche.

What? We feel aesthetic pleasure at a sonata by Beethoven and not at one with the same style and charm if it comes from one of our own contemporaries? Isn't that the height of hypocrisy? So then the sensation of beauty is not spontaneous, spurred by our sensibility, but instead is cerebral, conditioned by our knowing a date?

No way around it: historical consciousness is so thoroughly inherent in our perception of art that this anachronism (a Beethoven piece written today) would be spontaneously (that is, without the least hypocrisy) felt to be ridiculous, false, incongruous, even monstrous. Our feeling for continuity is so strong that it enters into the perception of any work of art.

Jan Mukarovsky, the founder of structural aesthetics, wrote in Prague in 1932: "Only the presumption of objective aesthetic value gives meaning to the historical evolution of art." In other words: in the absence of aesthetic value, the history of art is just an enormous storehouse of works whose chronologic sequence carries no meaning. And conversely: it is only within the context of an art's historical evolution that aesthetic value can be seen.

But what objective aesthetic value can we speak of if each nation, each historical period, each social group has tastes of its own? From the sociological viewpoint the history of an art has no meaning in itself but is part of a society's whole history, like the history of its clothing, its funeral and marriage rituals, its sports, or its celebrations. That is roughly how the novel is discussed in the Diderot and d'Alembert EncyclopÈdie (1751-72). The author of that entry, the Chevalier de Jaucourt, acknowledges that the novel has a broad reach ("nearly everyone reads it") and a moral influence (sometimes worthwhile, sometimes noxious), but not a specific value in itself; and furthermore, he mentions almost none of the novelists we admire today: not Rabelais, not Cervantes, not Quevedo, nor Grimmelshausen, nor Defoe, nor Swift, nor Smollett, nor Lesage, nor the AbbÈ PrÈvost; for the Chevalier de Jaucourt the novel does not stand as autonomous art or history.

Rabelais and Cervantes. That the encyclopedist did not cite either one of them is no shock: Rabelais hardly worried about whether he was a novelist or not, and Cervantes believed he was writing a sarcastic epilogue to the fantastical literature of the previous period; neither saw himself as "a founder." It was only in retrospect , over time, that the practice of the art of the novel assigned them the role. And it did so not because they were the first to write novels (there were many other novelists before Cervantes), but because their works made clear-better than the others had-the raison d'Ítre of this new epic art; because for their successors the works represented the first great novelistic values; and only when people began to see the novel as having a value-a specific value, an aesthetic value-could novels in their succession be seen as a history.

Theory of the Novel

Fielding was one of the first novelists able to conceive a poetics of the novel: each of the eighteen books of Tom Jones opens with a chapter devoted to a kind of theory of the novel (a light, playful theory, for that's how a novelist theorizes-he holds jealously to his own language, flees learned jargon like the plague).

Fielding wrote his novel in 1749, thus two centuries after Gargantua and Pantagruel and a century and a half after Don Quixote , and yet even though he looks back to Rabelais and Cervantes, for him the novel is still a new art, so much so that he calls himself "the founder of a new province of writing ..." That "new province" is so new that it has no name yet! ...

Excerpted from The Curtain by Milan Kundera Copyright © 2007 by Milan Kundera. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts

Milan kundera, , trans. from the french by linda asher. . harpercollins, $22.95 (168pp) isbn 978-0-06-084186-7.

Reviewed on: 11/06/2006

Genre: Nonfiction

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9780060841959

Milan Kundera

HarperCollins

18 July 2023

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"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.

Milan Kundera: The Curtain: An Essay In Seven Parts

In his essay collection The Art Of The Novel , Milan Kundera argued that the reader completes the act of novel-writing, by adding individual experiences that flesh out an author's sketchy characters and ideas. In The Curtain —a book-length essay divided into short trains of thought—Kundera puts the onus back on the author, describing how novelists from Cervantes to Kafka have torn through "the curtain" of presupposition to show us a new angle on what we thought we knew. The Curtain aims to do something similar, shifting our collective understanding of what sets the novelist apart from any other artist.

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Of particular interest to Kundera is the question of time, which in prose can be drawn out interminably—describing more actions in a single second of a character's day than even the character can perceive—or abruptly truncated. As Kundera puts it, "The novel alone [can] reveal the immense, mysterious power of the pointless." And unlike theater, cinema, or comics, novels can also avoid giving too much detail about how a character or a place looks, which universalizes those "pointless" moments.

Kundera follows different threads throughout The Curtain , and not all of them lead to especially fruitful places. But Kundera is inspiringly feisty, railing against the small-mindedness of comparative-literature professors, who think too narrowly in terms of national movements, as though Kafka never read a book by Flaubert. Kundera also debunks the archivist impulse to go against a writer's wishes and keep unpublished work in the public eye. To Kundera, the most important part of the author-reader contract is that authors get to control all that they can control, which are the actual words on the page.

It's a fair point, and it may explain why The Curtain is primarily concerned with modernism and not postmodernism or pastiche. (The problem with the latter is that the reader may be coming in fresh, not realizing that the author is borrowing from past masters.) But even though Kundera's biases sometimes get in the way of his argument, The Curtain is always lively and incisive, with an explication of European literature that doubles as a short history of the last two centuries of Western culture.

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