the curtain

in this entertaining and always stimulating essay, kundera cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in western civilization. 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, garcia 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 skillfully describes how the best novels do just that.