{"product_id":"curtain-book-milan-kundera-9780060841959","title":"The Curtain","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"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, New York Times Book Review\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"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.\"\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eHere 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.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eBut what is the unique knowledge only the novel can provide?\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cul\u003e \u003cli\u003e\n\u003cb\u003eThe Art of the Novel:\u003c\/b\u003e Kundera's deeply personal definition of a prose form that exists to tear through the \"curtain\" of pre-interpreted reality.\u003c\/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\n\u003cb\u003eA History of Forgetting:\u003c\/b\u003e An exploration of how memory transforms and erases, and why the novel is a unique fortress against the fleeting, ghostly nature of the past.\u003c\/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\n\u003cb\u003eCentral European Modernism:\u003c\/b\u003e A passionate defense of Kafka, Broch, and Musil, and how their antilyrical, analytical novels charted a different course for European literature.\u003c\/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\n\u003cb\u003eAesthetics and Existence:\u003c\/b\u003e Why concepts like kitsch, vulgarity, and the comical are not just artistic terms but keys to understanding the human condition.\u003c\/li\u003e \u003c\/ul\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49790842568977,"sku":"CIN0060841958G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50129961320721,"sku":"CIN0060841958A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50138332234001,"sku":"CIN0060841958VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50998863495441,"sku":"NIN9780060841959","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51708632760593,"sku":"GOR009145732","price":11.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0060841958.jpg?v=1751355871","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/products\/curtain-book-milan-kundera-9780060841959","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}