The Curtain, Milan Kundera
The Curtain, Milan Kundera
4 Rating(s)
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The Curtain
An Essay in Seven Parts

Author: Milan Kundera

Narrator: Graeme Malcolm

Unabridged: 9 hr 22 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download (DRM Protected)

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 09/25/2012

Synopsis

“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.

About Milan Kundera

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929–2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975 until his death. 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 more recent 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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Glenn on October 20, 2022

Robert Musil Literature Museum in Klagenfurt, Austria - French street artist Jef Aérosol did these three spray paint portraits: Christine Lavant (left), Ingeborg Bachmann (middle) and Robert Musil (right). All three authors are represented with their own exhibits in the museum. Robert Musil is one o......more

Goodreads review by Jibran on April 30, 2015

"Every novelist that writes today is actually in dialogue with his predecessors." Milan Kundera, who in my estimation is a great novelist, transmits that fascinating dialogue to the readers in this collection of short essays that when I picked up I knew would interest me. I am a keen reader of writer......more

Goodreads review by P.E. on February 22, 2020

Miscellaneous musings and rambling thoughts on art, conscience, history... On a very wide scope indeed! ------ Une collection de réflexions et d'observations qui comparent d'un seul tenant la conscience humaine, l'Histoire et les histoires de l'art !......more

Goodreads review by W.D. on November 25, 2022

I am in the middle of writing a gloss on its predecessor, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts while reading this for the second time... This extends his thinking about the history of the novel as developed in The Art of the Novel (my gloss on which can be read here )...and Testaments Betrayed......more

Goodreads review by Katia on August 01, 2022

This is a logical continuation of The Art of the Novel. By the way, I've just noticed that Henry James has got a book with that title. Kundera muses about his favourite writers, the destiny of his native country and the Eastern and Central Europe in general under the Soviet control and compares the......more

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