Novel’s life is elsewhere

The Curtain
Milan Kundera
Faber & Faber
168 pages
Rs395

It is a known fact that literary criticism from practicing authors/poets carries a whiff of fresh air as compared to those by professional critics and academics. Not that the end result is necessarily superior, but there is no extra burden of proving the probable and extricating the improbable.

Instead, as Milan Kundera’s The Curtain demonstrates, the writer-as-critic engages with the unencumbered flow of discourses and ideas that a novel is, rather than concentrate on the author.

The Curtain, the third in his series of explorations of the novel, after The Art Of The Novel and Testaments Betrayed, is a testament to Kundera’s passion for the European novel.

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, he might seem too preoccupied in the virtues of the Continent’s high priests of the novel to look for rebels. But Kundera is neither a classicist nor a wide-eyed surveyor of the masterworks of Europe.

In going back to the masters, and reading them from the vantage point of his own displacement (Czech writer who sought asylum in France and started 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 a “national literature”, and to define the personality of the novel as a literary form.

In the former, he sets the Continent’s greats against Central European and Latin American authors and sees a continuous overflow of imagination that tries to rip through the haze of meaning and open the curtains hiding the “soul of things”.

And in doing so, Kundera also defines what a novel is: a complex, consummate, and finally, 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 either make sense of or do justice to the variety of life.

Kundera is endearing, chatty and willfully disparate in his analyses. 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 ages it has also helped define.

This disarming tone leaves behind with the reader a lingering taste of a life that has long passed one by — a life unhurried and yet urgent, diffused and yet sophisticated — as observed by a man who has dedicated his life to letters.