The Curtain: Book summary and reviews of The Curtain by Milan Kundera

The Curtain

An Essay in Seven Parts

by Milan Kundera

The Curtain by Milan Kundera X
The Curtain by Milan Kundera
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  • Published Jan 2007
    176 pages
    Genre: Essays

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Book Summary

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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Media Reviews

tarred Review "It's not often that a work comes along that so perfectly distills an approach to art that it realigns the way an art form is understood." - PW.

This information about The Curtain was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Milan Kundera Author Biography

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, for more than twenty years. He is the author of the several books including The Joke (1967), Life is Elsewhere (1969), Farewell Waltz (1972), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), Immortality (1990), Slowness (1995), Identity (1998), the most recent The Festival of Insignificance (2015) and the short story collection Laughable Loves (1969). His works of nonfiction include The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed. He died in Paris in July 2023 aged 94.

Name Pronunciation
Milan Kundera: miLAN kun-DER-uh

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