31/08/2023, 22:46 The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts - By Milan Kundera - Books - Review - The New York Times

Reading With Kundera

By Russell Banks
March 4, 2007

Milan Kundera (who writes these days in French) is perhaps the best, certainly the best-known, Czech fiction writer since Kafka (who
was arguably more German than Czech anyway). This is his third book-length meditation on the novel, all three translated with
precision and grace by Linda Asher. And while there is a fair amount of overlap and repetition in “The Curtain,” “The Art of the Novel”
(1988) and “Testaments Betrayed” (1995), it’s due more to the consistency of Kundera’s approach to reading and writing fiction and the
persistence of certain literary preferences and prejudices — his literary values — than to an inability to move on. It’s also due to his
belief that reading and writing novels, from Cervantes to Rushdie, is a way of thinking that is essential for a coherent moral
understanding of human nature and circumstance.

“The Curtain” is constructed much the same as its predecessors: a loose sequence of separately titled, more or less topically focused
reflections that are each in turn broken into smaller segments with titles like “The Multiple Meanings of the Word ‘History’ ” and
“Maximum Diversity in Minimum Space.” There is no formal argument to it, no narrative or plot, no overt organizing principle tying
the segments and sequences together.

Joe Ciardiello

In Kundera’s hands, however, the bagginess of the form is appropriate. The book’s aphoristic, often flatly declarative style (Kundera
has strong opinions on everything, from E. M. Cioran’s youthful flirtation with fascism to the difference between foolishness and
stupidity) 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. Kundera himself tells us how to read his book: “A novelist talking about the art of the novel is not a professor giving a
discourse from his podium. Imagine him rather as a painter welcoming you into his studio, where you are surrounded by his canvases
staring at you from where they lean against the walls. He will talk about himself, but even more about other people, about novels of
theirs that he loves and that have a secret presence in his own work. According to his criteria of values, he will again trace out for you
the whole past of the novel’s history, and in so doing will give you some sense of his own poetics of the novel.”

Not surprisingly, then, reading “The Curtain” is like spending a long desultory afternoon into the evening sitting over coffee and
cigarettes in a pleasant cafe listening to Milan Kundera hold forth on history, literature, music, politics, large countries versus small,
East versus West, the lyric versus the novelistic, Paris versus Prague and so on into the night. One has the impression that Kundera, at
least on the page, is a fabulous talker and not an especially good listener. But he is 78 now, and he has lived through the military
occupation and liberation of his country twice and has endured more than three decades of exile; he has written at least three of the
most admired novels of our time, “The Joke,” “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” plus
another half-dozen books of fiction. Kundera’s opinions, reflections, memories and desires are well worth listening to.

Besides, he is one of the most erudite novelists on the planet. Not since Henry James, perhaps, has a fiction writer examined the
process of writing with such insight, authority and range of reference and allusion. For instance, while analyzing Tolstoy’s description
of Anna Karenina’s suicide, he notes in a tossed-off, parenthetical aside: “Stendhal likes to cut off the sound in the middle of a scene;
we stop hearing dialogue and start to follow a character’s secret thinking,” which leads him to speak of Anna’s last thoughts: “Here
Tolstoy is anticipating what Joyce will do 50 years later, far more systematically, in ‘Ulysses’ — what will be called ‘interior monologue’
or ‘stream of consciousness.’ ” Which in turn leads him to observe that “with his interior monologue, Tolstoy examines not, as Joyce
will do later, an ordinary, banal day, but instead the decisive moments of his heroine’s life. And that is much harder, for the more
dramatic, unusual, grave a situation is, the more the person describing it tends to minimize its concrete qualities. ... Tolstoy’s
examination of the prose of a suicide is therefore a great achievement, a ‘discovery’ that has no parallel in the history of the novel and
never will have.” End of parenthesis.

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31/08/2023, 22:46 The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts - By Milan Kundera - Books - Review - The New York Times

Joe Ciardiello
In Kundera’s somewhat Eurocentric view, the novel is uniquely able to express a highly ironic “antimodern modernism,” a mode of
disillusioned thinking that was fathered by Cervantes, who with Rabelais, Fielding, Sterne and Diderot established a lineage that is
“suspicious of tragedy: of its cult of grandeur; of its theatrical origins; of its blindness to the prose of life.” Thus he finds more
significant traces of Cervantes’s DNA in Fielding than in Balzac, and in Tolstoy more than Dostoyevsky. He finds it mainly in the works
of four 20th-century Central European writers whom he calls his “Pleiades” — Kafka, Musil, Broch and Gombrowicz — and more
recently in the works of Grass, Fuentes, García Márquez, Goytisolo, Chamoiseau and Rushdie, as if there were among contemporary
novelists a deliberate return to the source.

“The novel alone,” he says, “could reveal the immense, mysterious power of the pointless,” in opposition to the “pre-interpretation” of
reality. The novel, in Kundera’s view, is not a genre; it’s a way of busting through the myriad lies regarding human nature and our
collective and individual fates, lies that serve the purposes of bureaucracy and greed and the joyless quest for power. The “pre-
interpretation” of reality is the curtain referred to by the book’s title, “a magic curtain, woven of legends ... already made-up, masked,
reinterpreted. ... It is by tearing through the curtain of pre-interpretation that Cervantes set the new art going; his destructive act
echoes and extends to every novel worthy of the name; it is the identifying sign of the art of the novel.” (The italics are Kundera’s. He
is in fact rather fond of italics, giving to his words a sureness they might otherwise lack.)

He speaks approvingly but only in passing of Faulkner and Hemingway, and not at all of Twain, who surely ought to reside among his
Pleiades, or the Melville who wrote “The Confidence-Man,” or any other of the many American writers working in the grand tradition
of what he calls “the privileged sphere of analysis, lucidity, irony.” One could make a long list of Americans qualified to reside there:
Hawthorne, James, Sinclair Lewis, Nathanael West, on to near-contemporaries like Donald Barthelme, Joseph Heller and Robert
Coover, who surely were influenced by Kundera’s Middle European stars, Kafka, Musil, Broch, but who chose to drawl it out in
American English, mixing syncopation and burlesque with “analysis, lucidity, irony.” If I have any quarrel with Kundera’s description
of the history of the novel it’s that he’s not inclusive enough. He does not discuss a single female novelist, even in passing. It’s as if no
Western woman has ever tried writing a serious novel in 400 years. And, in his appreciation of non-European novelists like Fuentes,
García Márquez and Chamoiseau, he colonizes them, as if culturally they gazed longingly toward their European mother- and
fatherlands instead of their homelands. But then, he’s not writing literary criticism; he’s writing the secret history of the novels of
Milan Kundera and teaching us how to read them.

Russell Banks’s most recent novel is “The Darling.” His new novel, “The Reserve,” will be published in 2008.

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