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the complete review - literature

The Curtain

by
Milan Kundera

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : nice essay on the novel and literature

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "This short book of seven linked essays is a swiftly-told, neautifully crafted, pleasurable pan-European scrutiny of the novel from François Rabelais in the 16th century onwards -- an act of literay criticism by one of today's great practising novelists." - The Economist
  
  
• "Kundera’s tone is seductive, sly and, above all, personal: his excursions into literary history are a way of talking about himself and his art." - Jonathan Derbyshire, Financial Times
  
  
• "Denn natürlich sind Kunderas essayistische Exkursionen keine Theorie im wissenschaftlichen Sinn. Es sind Bekenntnisse, Notizen, Gedankenspaziergänge eines Lesers, der vor dem gewöhnlichen Leser oder Denker den Vorsprung der praktischen Erfahrung hat. Kundera schreibt, worüber er spricht. Das gibt seinen Betrachtungen eine selbstverständliche Autorität, selbst dann, wenn er über Dinge redet, die seinem Gesichtskreis fernliegen." - Andreas Kilb, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "(A) brilliant and beautifully intricate continuous argument. Its main thesis is the absolutely true idea that the novel shows us the prose of life, the unedited version, with its absence of grand events, the sense of life's inevitable undramatic defeat. (...) The Curtain is crammed with memorable phrases, exciting provocations, and breathtaking insights. (...) The Curtain is great criticism. It is an account of the novel, its shifting poetics, and a record of Kundera's own meticulous reading - what he reads, how he reads, and therefore how we now have to read also." - Craig Raine, The Guardian
  
  
• "The Curtain has the inestimable advantage of making the reader think. In this it is large in import and encouragement beyond its elegant 160-odd pages. Most attractive of all, perhaps, are Kundera's deep and reasoned belief in the value of the novelist's profession and his utter withering scorn for the prizes-for-all cash-in that contemporary literature perpetually threatens to become." - Tim Martin, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "The Curtain is not one of Kundera's best books, but to readers for whom he has provided a crucial piece of the literary puzzle, it cannot be missed. Here (do I dare say it ?) there is a greater openness, a more revealing sense of the sources of his authority -- namely, his own life. More to the point, there is a vulnerability, as much as Kundera (who is not alone in his desire for seclusion from his readers) might like to deny it. In that vulnerability, he, like his readers, is and will always be vulnerable, full of doubt, homeless if not lost." - Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Kundera's purpose is not just to lay out his sense of the novel's historical possibilities but to show that it has a history, and that its history is very different from History in the larger sense. (...) What's coming to an end, devolving into repetition, is not the novel, but what Kundera has to say about the novel. It gives me no pleasure to point this out, but there is very little here he hasn't said before and said better, most of it in The Art of the Novel, some of it in Testaments Betrayed, his other book-length essay. The Curtain is certainly well worth reading for anyone who doesn't know those other works. It is witty and brisk and very smart, like all of his writing. But it falls far short of The Art of the Novel, not only because he has so little new to say but because the earlier work was produced in the full flush of his novelistic career." - William Deresiewicz, The Nation
  
  
• "His essay is not a systematic survey of the novel, but an idiosyncratic history of his favourites -- Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Musil, Gombrowicz -- studded with the dicta of a great practitioner, guiding us to surprising, fragmentary perspectives. (...) (T)his short work is bursting at the seams with ideas and creative sympathy." - Steven Poole, New Statesman
  
  
• "Yet in The Curtain, amid lucid repetitions of familiar obsessions (...) Mr. Kundera also offers witty and edifying improvisations on these favorite themes, and adds some new ones. And the reader is grateful, too, for omissions: Mr. Kundera, as cocky as ever, preens less than in his previous nonfiction books. (...) Mr. Kundera's insights into the history of the novel are a delight. (...) Anyone interested in the novel will delight in this book." - Alec Solomita, The New York Sun
  
  
• "In Kundera's hands, however, the bagginess of the form is appropriate. The book's aphoristic, often flatly declarative style (...) allows for an elegant, personalized integration of anecdote, analysis, scholarship, memory and speculation. This is not strictly or even loosely speaking literary criticism; nor on the other hand is it merely a meander through the mind of a philosophically inclined novelist." - Russell Banks, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "(T)his zigzagging history of the form (.....) He reduces me to the same blissful burbling. Ah, Kundera !" - Peter Conrad, The Observer
  
  
• "The Curtain is light and playful, elliptical, aphoristic, sometimes contradictory, and in its fewer than 200 pages contains multitudes. (...) A fresh idea or insight sparks here on the turn of every page. (...) Just treat yourself. You’re unlikely to read an essay this year full of more knowledge, more wisdom and more love." - Sam Leith, The Spectator
  
  
• "The Curtain is 168 pages long, also in seven parts (Kundera's books often are), but its prose is harmonious and its arguments, though similar, are orderly. (...) The Curtain's graceful cohesiveness makes it a work of art in its own right. In fact, it's wonderful, endlessly quotable, and not at all let down by Linda Asher's translation from the French." - Duncan Fallowell, Sunday Telegraph
  
  
• "Kundera’s essay is anything but academic, and its dogged idiosyncrasy is what helps make it readable as well as exasperating. It rapidly becomes apparent that Kundera is not writing about some absolute, Platonic ideal of prose fiction, but about the novelists he has most admired, and who have helped him to become the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and the like." - Kevin Jackson, Sunday Times
  
  
• "The Curtain is by no means an overarching theory of the European novel, more a series of impressionistic, often personal, sketches that always frame the aesthetic subject within some wider context: cultural, political, or historical. If the dominant mode remains that of a detatched and analytical intelligence, there is a persistent lyrical strain running throughout his writing, and rising, on rare occasions, to ravishing effect." - Justin Beplate, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "(A) work of sophisticated literary cartography. (...) The view informing The Curtain is chiefly Continental. (...) Written in aphoristic style, The Curtain is agreeably studded with insights that may have been overlooked even by veteran readers of the novel." - Joseph Epstein, Wall Street Journal
  
  
• "One may disagree with this -- surely, there is a place in our lives for entertainment and escape -- but, as the French expression goes, Kundera always gives you furiously to think. He quotes brilliantly too" - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
  
  
• "Milan Kundera tut in diesem Buch, was er schon in zwei anderen getan hat. Er umreißt seine Theorie des Romans. (...) Kalter Kaffee also ? Keineswegs. Obgleich man manches liest, was man schon kennt, liest man sehr vergnügt und weiß nicht, wofür man diesen Essay mehr schätzen soll: für seine Leidenschaft und Frische, für seine Strenge oder für seine Leichtigkeit ?" - Andreas Isenschmid, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Curtain is the third essay Milan Kundera has written that focusses specifically on the novel. The novel-form is what Kundera loves and is fascinated by, and from Don Quixote to The Sleepwalkers he finds it offers more than essentially any other human accomplishment. Its particular appeal lies in the aspect that also gives this essay its title. As he explains:

     (T)he world, when it rushes toward us at the moment of our birth, is already made-up, masked, preinterpreted. And the conformists won't be the only ones fooled; the rebel types, eager to stand up against everything and everyone, will not realize how obedient they themselves are; they will only rebel against what is interpreted (preinterpreted) as worthy of rebellion.

For it is by tearing the curtain of preinterpretation that Cervantes set that new art going: his destructive act echoes and extends through in every novel worthy of the name; it is the identifying sign of the art of the novel.

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Links:

• HarperCollins publicity page
• Faber publicity page
• Hanser publicity page

• Bookslut
• The Brooklyn Rail
• Deutschlandradio (German)
• Dispatches from Zembla
• L'Express (French)
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
• The Guardian
• The Hindu
• Kirkus Reviews
• Lingua Romana
• Lire (French)
• literaturkritik.de (German)
• Macaroni
• Le Monde diplomatique (French)
• The New York Sun
• The Observer
• The Onion
• Philadelphia Inquirer
• Publishers Weekly
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Sydney Morning Herald
• This Space
• 3:AM Magazine
• Three Monkeys Online
• Turning Pages
• The Washington Post
• Die Zeit (German)

• Milan Kundera site
• Milan Kundera at books and writers
• Milan Kundera at GuardianUnlimited

• The Festival of Insignificance
• Identity

• François Ricard's Agnès's Final Afternoon

• Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers
• Marta Petreu's study of E.M.Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania, An Infamous Past
• See Index of Literary Essays
• See Index of Eastern European literature
• See Index of French literature

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About the Author:

       Milan Kundera lived 1929 to 2023. The author of numerous highly acclaimed and widely translated novels he left Czechoslovakia in 1975, settling in France. He has become a French citizen, and beginning with Slowness (1995) has completely forsaken his native language, writing even his fiction in French.

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© 2007-2023 the complete review

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