“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.
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Milan Kundera is the author of the novels The Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves—all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, 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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Book Description Condition: New. pp. viii + 168 1st Published. Seller Inventory # 26254027
Book Description Soft Cover. Condition: new. Seller Inventory # 9780571232819
Book Description Condition: New. pp. viii + 168. Seller Inventory # 7626644
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. '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. A brilliant exploration of the novel - its history and its art - from one of the genre's most distinguished practitioners. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780571232819
Book Description Condition: New. Buy with confidence! Book is in new, never-used condition. Seller Inventory # bk0571232817xvz189zvxnew
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Book Description Paperback / softback. Condition: New. New copy - Usually dispatched within 4 working days. In this entertaining and always stimulating collection of seven essays, Kundera deftly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel. Seller Inventory # B9780571232819
Book Description Paperback. Condition: Brand New. 176 pages. 7.72x5.08x0.51 inches. In Stock. Seller Inventory # __0571232817