Girish's Reviews > The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts – Literary Criticism and Philosophy of the Novel by Milan Kundera

"For it is clear immediately: human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That - that is the raison d'être of the art of the novel.”

I think if I had read it as a physical copy/ebook than as an audiobook this would have been a 5 star read. This entertaining history of idea of a novel expressed through his readings is brilliant. It goes behind the curtains of the pages to explore the life in a novel.

Is novel an exaggeration of life or is it the dramatisation of human sentiments. Obviously, we meet Madame Boavary - the lack of goodness that redeems a novel. We meet Don Quixote, Anna Karena and Kafka. We deconstruct the characters in the novel as people in situations - an author's responsibility. Fantastic ideas that you forget in the flood of ideas.

I found the seed for his book 'Immortality' and maybe 'Joke' among the ideas discussed. Memory and History in a novel, the obsession with the artist than the art - this book touches a lot of interesting ideas.

Gives out spoilers to many major books which is a negative. I loved the book on the whole but suffered from not being able to savour the ideas.

One for the physical library.