Milan Kundera has been described as the greatest Czech author since Kafka, and his latest book has united critics around the globe in high praise for his ability to write beautiful prose. It charts Kundera’s personal journey through the history and evolution of the novel as an art form. There is just one question. Where are all the female authors?

Craig Raine in The Guardian is typical in his adoration for The Curtain. He says it “is a brilliant and beautifully intricate continuous argument. Its main thesis is the absolutely true idea that the novel shows us the prose of life, the unedited version, with its absence of grand events, the sense of life's inevitable undramatic defeat. Kundera's image for this is the curtain that the novel draws back so we can see what is there.”

And critics agree that it is Kundera’s ability to write which draws the reader in. Jonathon Derbyshire in the Financial Times thinks Kundera’s tone is “seductive, sly and, above all, personal: his excursions into literary history are a way of talking about himself and his art.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking The Curtain was far too highbrow to be enjoyable, but you’d be mistaken, according to Kevin Jackson in The Sunday Times: “Fortunately, Kundera’s essay is anything but academic, and its dogged idiosyncrasy is what helps make it readable as well as exasperating. It rapidly becomes apparent that Kundera is not writing about some absolute, Platonic ideal of prose fiction, but about the novelists he has most admired, and who have helped him to become the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and the like.”

Carlin Romano, writing on the Pop Matters website, acknowledges Kundera’s lofty intentions, but warms to his clear infatuation with his subject matter: “The names may make your head swim if you haven’t fulfilled World Lit prerequisites, but those with a taste for grand landscapes of literature will enjoy Kundera’s canvas of sweeping aphorism and pointillist reports. Those who regard the novel, like life itself, as flawed may find themselves less infatuated.

“For Kundera, it continues as the ‘privileged sphere of analysis, lucidity, irony.’ It possesses its own ‘muse,’ ‘genesis,’ ‘history,’ ‘morality.’ Novelistic thinking is “fiercely independent of any system of preconceived ideas; it does not judge; it does not proclaim truths; it questions, it marvels, it plumbs.

“Relationship counsellors have a word for this: idealization. Which suggests a conclusion. The Curtain is a love story. Milan Kundera and the ‘novel’ sitting in a paper object produced from a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Like good love stories, it pulls you in.”

The Cruellest Month blog found The Curtain entertaining and stimulating. “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.”

Peter Conrad of The Observer falls head over heels for The Curtain, and in particular enjoys the levity of Kundera’s writing. “At times he gives up explaining and instead simply exclaims, voicing an aesthetic wonder and gratitude censured by those who profess literature in universities. Mentioning Smetana's string quartets, he inserts an appreciative parenthesis: 'splendid!’ Even more eloquently, in a climactic passage about the audacity of the modern novel, he allows words to fail him: 'And Ulysses!' he says, leaving the exclamation mark to convey his reverence for it. He reduces me to the same blissful burbling. Ah, Kundera!”

Meanwhile, Russell Bank, writing in the New York Times, is almost begrudging in his praise: “Reading The Curtain is like spending a long desultory afternoon into the evening sitting over coffee and cigarettes in a pleasant cafe listening to Milan Kundera hold forth on history, literature, music, politics, large countries versus small, East versus West, the lyric versus the novelistic, Paris versus Prague and so on into the night.”

Mr Bank was the only critic to find fault with The Curtain. “If I have any quarrel with Kundera's description of the history of the novel it's that he's not inclusive enough. He does not discuss a single female novelist, even in passing. It's as if no Western woman has ever tried writing a serious novel in 400 years.”

A fair point, but an isolated case. The A.V. Club website is more emphatic. It gives The Curtain a tidy B+. “Even though Kundera’s biases sometimes get in the way of his argument, The Curtain is always lively and incisive, with an explication of European literature that double as a short history of Western culture.”

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