The Curtain: Essays

The Curtain: Essays

$32.99 AUD $10.00 AUD



NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand books is not always available. Please contact us if you have a question about this title.
Author: Milan Kundera

Format: Paperback

Number of Pages: 176


'A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world,' writes Milan Kundera in The Curtain, his fascinating new book on the art of the novel. 'Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore the curtain. The world opened before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.' For Kundera, that curtain represents the 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. In this entertaining and always stimulating essay, Kundera deftly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilisation. 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, Gracia Marquez 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 skilfully describes how the best novels do that.
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Description
NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand books is not always available. Please contact us if you have a question about this title.
Author: Milan Kundera

Format: Paperback

Number of Pages: 176


'A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world,' writes Milan Kundera in The Curtain, his fascinating new book on the art of the novel. 'Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore the curtain. The world opened before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.' For Kundera, that curtain represents the 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. In this entertaining and always stimulating essay, Kundera deftly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilisation. 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, Gracia Marquez 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 skilfully describes how the best novels do that.