“The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts”
by Milan Kundera, translated from the French by Linda Asher
Harper Collins, 2006
168 pages

Many adjectives have been used to describe Milan Kundera’s writings: dazzling, brilliant, exhilarating, wise, witty, sly, satirical, subversive, provocative, philosophical, erotic, spiritual, profound, playful—and, they’re all true.

Kundera, who was born in Czechoslovokia in 1929 and has lived in France since 1975, is perhaps best known for his novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (and the resulting popular movie). Altogether he has published nine novels, a book of short stories, three books of essays including his latest, several plays and some poetry.

Summarizing and further developing many ideas that have appeared in his previous nonfiction books, “The Curtain” is like a love letter from Kundera to the writers he admires. He is passionate about the uniqueness and importance of the novel—“the art that is the privileged sphere of analysis, lucidity, irony” and the literary form that can “get into the soul of things … behind the curtain,” he writes.

For Kundera, “the novel remains to us as the last observatory from which we can embrace human life as a whole.” He says, “the novelist discovers an aspect of human nature till then unknown, concealed.”

“The Curtain” is not a comprehensive survey of the history of the novel or a textbook on the craft of novel writing. Rather, it’s an idiosyncratic and highly personal meditation.

With fascinating diversions, Kundera proceeds by a roughly chronological discussion and explication of the authors and novels that have meant the most to him. They are vital, he says, because they broadened the concept of the novel by introducing new themes, forms or techniques. Among those he counts as having had a measurable influence on his own craft and the form itself are Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Sartre, Joyce and Marquez, with special emphasis on the group of writers he calls the “Pleiades of Central Europe’s great novelists”: Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch and Witold Gombrowicz.

For a European who has lived through 20th century wars and occupations, history is a dominant preoccupation, both personally and culturally. Kundera believes that we cannot understand a work of art without knowing its historical context and also the age of the artist who produced it. Unlike the history of science, which is basically the story of progress, Kundera says the history of art “resembles a journey … to see what (previous artists) did not see (and to) say what they did not say.”

He also has intriguing and provocative things to say about age and the relationship between the novel and the “most lyrical of arts, poetry and music,” both of which, but especially music, Kundera knows well and loves.

He describes  “youth as the lyrical age … when the individual (is) focused almost exclusively on himself (and) is unable to see, to comprehend, to judge clearly the world around him.” For Kundera, “to pass from immaturity to maturity is to move beyond the lyrical attitude.”

In a wonderful section near the end of the book, returning to the question of age, he describes the late works of Picasso, Fellini and Beethoven. He contrasts the radical difference between a younger and older person’s sense of freedom, citing for example Fellini’s late “joyful irresponsibility.”

In contrast to poetry, prose “signifies the concrete, everyday, corporal nature of life.” In discussing Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” Kundera speaks of  “the mysterious way of prose, where ugliness rubs shoulders with beauty, where the rational gives over to illogic, and where an enigma remains an enigma.”

Kundera says that Cervantes (in “Don Quixote”) started the history of the art of the novel with three questions about existence: “What is a person’s identity? What is truth? What is love?” Fielding “claims the right to interrupt the narration” as often as he wishes. Sterne introduces “the first radical and total dethroning of ‘story.’” Balzac shows “compassion for the ephemeral, salvaging the perishable.” Dostoyevsky illustrates “the beauty of a sudden density of life.” Flaubert “encloses an action within a larger whole.”

Kafka, Broch, Musil and Sartre shifted the novel away from its fascination with the psychology of characters and brought it to “the existential analysis of situations.” Kundera argues that these existential writers showed how rigorous thinking and intellectual analysis can be incorporated successfully into a novel without reducing its artistic beauty.

Like them, Kundera loves jokes, funny stories and hoaxes. He has no real sympathy for those who do not understand joking or the comical, but instead regard such lack of seriousness as “an affront to the sacred nature of life.”

He hates the provincialism of both small and large nations, the “ornamentalization” of prose, the cult of the “grandeur” of tragedy, false sentimentality, kitsch—what Musil called “bread drenched in perfume” and Kundera has in another book called “a folding screen set up to curtain off death.”

A major theme of his own books is the bureaucratization of modern life, which he says “shifts the meaning of every concept of existence: freedom, private life, time, adventure (and) combat.”

For him, the overall structure of a novel, its compositional architecture, is crucial. And characters exist for the purpose of exploring the possibilities of life in various situations; they need to be understood, not admired for their virtues.
He argues that works of philosophy and the arts are of equal importance to grand political events in characterizing a historical age.

Kundera probably won’t help you write your next novel—and may even intimidate you a bit by the standards he sets—but he is likely to make you think a little harder and appreciate even more the grand significance of the novel and art in general.

It is tempting to view this book as Kundera’s final summary of his most basic beliefs and values, since he is now nearly 78 years old. His views are likely too dogmatic for some—or too cool, ironic, and anti-romantic for others—but in general you are so delighted to be in the presence of this brilliant, erudite, funny and passionate European intellectual that you are happy to lean back in your chair, nod appreciatively, and sip your cappuccino as you listen to him continue his long train of thought.