The New York Times today has published a Russell Banks review of Milan Kundera’s new book, “The Curtain,” a series of reflections on reading and writing novels. The piece is written quite well and points out that even if Kundera’s treatment of the material is wildly solipsistic – for instance, in its inability to even mention a single female novelist – there is much to be gained in that it can be used as a treatise on understanding the thought process behind Kundera’s own material.
“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.â€
Banks also speaks about the title and its meaning to Kundera:
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.â€
