Traces the author's personal view of the history and significance of the novel in western civilization, arguing that a novel's development crosses international and language boundaries while serving to reveal previously unknown aspects of a reader's existence. By the author of The Art of the Novel. Reprint. "An elegant, personalized integration of anecdote, analysis, scholarship, memory and speculation. . . . Not since Henry James, perhaps, has a fiction writer examined the process of writing with such insight, authority and range of reference and allusion." --Russell Banks, New York Times Book Review "A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose." In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the art of the novel, renowned author Milan Kundera suggests that "the curtain" represents a ready-made perception of the world that each of us has--a pre-interpreted world. The job of the novelist, he argues, is to rip through the curtain and reveal what it hides. Here an incomparable literary artist cleverly sketches out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. In doing so, he celebrates a prose form that possesses the unique ability to transcend national and language boundaries in order to reveal some previously unknown aspect of human existence. Part One: The Consciousness of Continuity 1(28) The Consciousness of Continuity History and Value Theory of the Novel Poor Alonzo Quijada The Despotism of ``Story'' In Search of Present Time The Multiple Meanings of the Word ``History'' The Beauty of a Sudden Density of Life The Power of the Pointless The Beauty of a Death The Shame of Repeating Oneself Part Two: DIE WELTLITERATUR 29(28) Maximum Diversity in Minimum Space Irreparable Inequality Die Weltliteratur The Provincialism of Small Nations The Provincialism of Large Nations The Man from the East Central Europe The Contrasting Paths of the Modernist Revolt My Great Pleiades Kitsch and Vulgarity Antimodern Modernism Part Three: Getting Into the Soul of Things 57(28) Getting Into the Soul of Things Ineradicable Error Situations What Only the Novel Can Say Thinking Novels The Frontier of the Implausible Is No Longer Under Guard Einstein and Karl Rossmann In Praise of Jokes The History of the Novel as Seen from Gombrowicz's Studio A Different Continent The Silvery Bridge Part Four: What Is a Novelist? 85(16) To Understand, We Must Compare The Poet and the Novelist A Conversion Story The Soft Gleam of the Comical The Torn Curtain Fame They Killed My Albertine Marcel Proust's Verdict The Ethic of the Essential Reading Is Long, Life Is Short The Little Boy and His Grandmother Cervantes's Verdict Part Five: Aesthetics and Existence 101(16) Aesthetics and Existence Action Agelasts Humor And If the Tragic Has Deserted Us? The Deserter The Tragic Chain Hell Part Six: The Torn Curtain 117(28) Poor Alonzo Quijada The Torn Curtain The Torn Curtain of the Tragic The Fairy Going Down Into the Dark Depths of a Joke Bureaucracy According to Stifter The Defiled World of Castle and Village The Existential Meaning of the Bureaucratized World The Ages of Life Concealed Behind the Curtain Morning Freedom, Evening Freedom Part Seven: The Novel, Memory, Forgetting 145 Amelie Forgetting That Erases, Memory That Transforms The Novel as Utopia of a World That Has No Forgetting in It Composition A Forgotten Birth Unforgettable Forgetting A Forgotten Europe The Novel as Journey Through the Centuries and the Continents The Theater of Memory Consciousness of Continuity Eternity