Curtain

<p><strong>An elegant personalized integration of anecdote analysis scholarship memory and speculation. . . . Not since Henry James perhaps has a fiction writer examined the process of writing with such insight authority and range of reference and allusion. --Russell Banks <em>New York Times Book Review</em></strong></p><p><em>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.</em></p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p>