THE CURTAIN: An Essay in Seven Parts by Milan Kundera

Faber £12.99

Alan Bennett once wrote and performed in a beautifully observed parody of television arts documentaries — long since wiped by some wretched BBC jobsworth — in which he played an earnest, working-class novelist from the north, now a tax exile on the Med. The duty of the novelist, Bennett’s character explained in hushed, lilting tones, was to seek out and extract the very essence of things: or, as he put it, “to take the pith out of reality”. Milan Kundera would have enjoyed this remark, whether or not he caught the naughty play on words, since in his view the distinguishing mark of the true novelist from Rabelais and Cervantes onwards has been the wish to tear down the curtains of prefabricated illusion (hence the mildly cryptic title of this essay) and to expose the world “in all the comic nakedness of its prose”.

Were The Curtain a more sober academic tract, Kundera’s statement would immediately provoke all manner of heated objections: surely the novel has embraced wider ambitions and conjured other pleasures than mere pith-taking? 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. Besides Rabelais and Cervantes, he reveres Kafka, Musil, Broch, Gombrowicz . . . in short, solitaries, visionaries, quiet rebels, inner émigrés and heroes who subscribe, as Kundera proudly does, to Goethe’s notion of Die Weltliteratur: World Literature.

Plainly, Kundera’s pantheon is skewed towards central Europe, and as such will look pretty odd to most British readers, who tend to believe that, say, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Walter Scott, George Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens and Hardy have enjoyed considerably more than just local reputations. On this illustrious British team, Kundera remains all but silent, mentioning Scott only in passing (and yet Sir Walter was once read avidly from Alabama to St Petersburg — a true figure in Die Weltliteratur if ever there was one). The only British authors to merit the tribute of Kun-deran analysis are Fielding, for his comical reflections on the novel art of the novel in Tom Jones, and Sterne, for the Rabelaisian aspects of Tristram Shandy. At the risk of sounding like Mr Podsnap, there has to be something seriously cockeyed about any book on the novel which remains mum on the prodigious genius of Dickens — who among other virtues was, as Kundera surely knows, a profound influence on Kafka.

Once past the hurdle of wounded patriotic spirit, the British reader will find plenty to agree with in Kundera’s essays, if not much to surprise. (The translator, Linda Asher, must be American — at any rate, the book teems with gum-snapping locutions, such as “smart” for “clever”, “mean” for “unpleasant”.) He is absolutely right to stress the ways in which novels and novelists, generally taught as if they were products only of national tradition and individual talent, have been generously internationalist in spirit virtually from the outset. Gide, as Kundera points out, was the best reader of Dostoevsky; Broch of Joyce; and just about any 20th-cen-tury novelist worth reading began by studying Flaubert, even if only to reject his agonis-ingly high principles. Kundera is also right to bemoan the parochial ignorance that leads even relatively educated westerners to call his native Czechoslovakia an “Eastern” rather than a Central European nation. Chamberlain’s horrible Munich phrase “a faraway country of which we know little” still rankles with him.

Kundera’s arguments are often richer and finer in their smaller details than in their grand sweep. He is thoughtful and thought-provoking on the curious fact that surrealism, an intellectual movement that purported to despise the novel, should have ended up as a huge inspiration on so many novelists of later generations. (Another Podsnapian carp: he fails to note that the greatest surrealist director, Luis Bunuel, made a version of Robinson Crusoe; or that many surrealists cheerfully went against the party line by adoring Wuthering Heights.) He usefully retrieves from Rabelais the technical term “agelast” — one who does not laugh, and cannot see the point of jokes. Some intellectuals disdain comedy, though, as Jane Austen could have explained, had she thought there was any point in it, humour can be a mode of the highest intelligence. But the most valuable lesson to be found in this short book is one that is never explicitly spelt out — the lesson that, if we want to see our own writers in true perspective, more of us should start reading the likes of Musil’s Man Without Qualities, Broch’s Sleepwalkers and Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke. For this pith, at least, we owe Kundera some polite thanks.

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