It is a known fact that literary criticism from practising authors/ poets carry a whiff of fresh air as compared to those by professional critics and academics. Not that in the case of the former, the end result is necessarily superior, but they do not have that extra burden of proving the probable and extricating the improbable. Instead, as Milan Kundera’s The Curtain amply exhibits, a writer engages with the unencumbered flow of discourses and ideas that a novel becomes the site of, instead of concentrating too much on the author. But Milan Kundera is not just any writer and The Curtain is not just any book of criticism. He is one of the most distinguished practitioners of the novel and The Curtain is his third book, hence at a more developed evolutionary stage than his two previous explorations, Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed. It is a rare feat that one of the world’s most loved authors have had the proclivity to go back to his peers in three full-length books, to discuss the widest possible range of ideas that The European Novel have or could have provoked.

Those familiar with Kundera’s other two works may be a tad disappointed that he has gone back to his talismans – Flaubert, Sterne, Kafka, Joyce, Dostoevsky, Broch, Gombrowicz, Hasek and of course the peerless Rabelais and Cervantes. To first-time readers, Kundera might seem too preoccupied to extol the virtues of the Continent’s high priests of the novel rather than looking for the rebels. But Kundera is neither a classicist nor a wide-eyed surveyor of the masterworks of Europe. In going back to them, and reading them from the vantage point of his own displaced self-hood (Czech writer seeking asylum in France and then taking up writing in French), Kundera invests the classics not only with new meaning but also with a sense of urgency, an ethos that is unaffected by time, memory and myth-making.

The Curtain unwraps with two immediate tasks: to dispel any idea of national literature and two, to define the personality of the novel form. In the former, he sets the Continent’s greats against Central European and Latin American authors and sees a continuous and contagious overflow of imagination that tries to rip through the haze of meaning-making, the curtain so to say, to get to the ‘soul of things’. And in doing so, Kundera also defines what a novel is — a complex, consummate and essentially a comical enterprise. Comedy, thinks Kundera, is the only possible genre that can represent the endless and tireless transactions of modern life. He considers verse or tragedy too simple and chaste to make sense of and do justice to the insidious veracity of life that Europe has lived in the last few centuries. The good thing is Kundera undertakes this scrutiny quite effortlessly; an effortlessness that is incumbent when a liberal mind engages at leisure with an expansive genre like the novel.

Kundera is endearing, chatty and willfully disparate in his analysis. As if he is no more than an engaged and intelligent reader trying to understand what makes the novel the great literary form of the age it has also helped define. This disarming, unchained tone of the book leaves behind the lingering taste of life passed by — a life unhurried and yet urgent, diffused and yet sophisticated — as observed by a man who has dedicated his life to letters.

The Curtain | Milan Kundera | Faber & Faber | 2007 | 168pp