The Curtain: An essay in seven parts

The Curtain: An essay in seven parts

by Milan Kundera (Author), Linda Asher (Translator), Milan Kundera (Author), Linda Asher (Translator)

Synopsis

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, Garcia Marquez 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 skilfully describes how the best novels do just that.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 176
Edition: Main
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 15 Mar 2007

ISBN 10: 0571232817
ISBN 13: 9780571232819
Book Overview: Milan Kundera's The Curtain: Essays is a brilliant exploration of the novel - its history and its art - from one of the genre's most distinguished practitioners.

Author Bio
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.