2.14.2007
TNC and Milan Kundera, then and now.
[Posted 11:42 AM by Emily Ghods]
In a book review published several days ago by the Wall Street Journal (log-in required), friend and contributor to The New Criterion Joseph Epstein comes around to gently—but not softly—censuring Milan Kundera’s latest book, The Curtain.
Written as an extended essay studded with aphorisms, The Curtain is a Kundera’s monologue on ‘the novel’ as a form unto itself: Epstein writes, “he sets out to define what it is, exactly, that the novel attempts to discover.”
Here is a preview of Epstein’s review:
Henry James would have been the perfect reviewer for “The Curtain.” One can easily imagine him subtly eviscerating Mr. Kundera’s literary predilections, suggesting that his too great interest in ideas detracts from the true task of the novel — chronicling the longings of the human heart. “Drapes” is the title James might have given to such a review.
Epstein ends his review with not a little more wisdom than the blank and curious aphorisms of Mr. Kundera’s latest work (among such bloated maxims is “The novel alone could reveal the immense, mysterious power of the pointless.):
Might it not be time to redraw the lines of the novelistic tradition, reconnect the dots and discover in this most fructifying of literary forms a subtler new map by which to find our way to that never-ending ball “of the great enigma of existence”?
For more on The New Criterion and Milan Kundera, check out this article from our archives, ’The Ambiguities of Milan Kundera” by Roger Kimball (January, 1986).