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    The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
    The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
    The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
    Audiobook4 hours

    The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts

    Written by Milan Kundera

    Narrated by Graeme Malcolm

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    “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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateSep 25, 2012
    ISBN9780062215628
    The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
    Author

    Milan Kundera

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

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    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Subtitled "An Essay in Seven Parts", this is a valuable companion for Kundera's earlier "Art of the Novel". Divided into seven sections the essay covers a plethora of concepts related to reading and understanding the nature of the novel. Idiosyncratic though it may be, it is undeniably a font of commentary that welcomes the reader to expand his consciousness through reading.
    • 1/5
      a very european way of looking at literature. anectodal and visceral. not relevant.