Milan Kundera is without question one of the important novelists of the 20th century (and one of my favorites). The fact that he has stopped writing novels in favor of shorter forms and non-fiction makes some of us sad, but with his advancing age he has chosen to follow other pursuits.
His newest work is The Curtain, reviewed here at AlterNet, and not too favorably:
This is just one chunk of a much longer review (that is well worth reading).Indeed, the characteristic rhetorical feature of Kundera's novelistic meditations is the question, and we might say that his novels as a whole are written in an interrogative mode, as investigations into the kinds of existential dilemmas he finds in his Central European predecessors. They are also written, like those of his heroes, in a spirit of laughter and play (for as Kundera likes to remind us, even Kafka laughed at what he wrote, though of his dark humor we have discarded the humor and kept only the darkness). It is no accident that one of Kundera's books is called The Joke, a second Laughable Loves and a third The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, or that "levity" is a synonym for "lightness."
But humor signifies more for Kundera than just mirth. It is, he says, a distinctly modern attitude, one in which all beliefs are relativized, all fixed ideas called into question, all self-importance deflated by exposure to competing perspectives. Here as throughout his career, the novel is the great enemy of the romantic or lyrical spirit: of emotionalism and idealism and the egotistic self-absorption from which they proceed. For Kundera, lyric poetry is the genre of youthful naïveté and thus of susceptibility to totalitarian enthusiasm; the novel, the genre of maturity: of irony, disillusionment, sophistication and analytic detachment.
In this, too, he is the heir of the Central Europeans, for two reasons. First, he says, the Modernist revolt in Central Europe was very different from what it was in his adopted country of France. French Modernism, in the wake of eighteenth-century classicism and rationalism and the novel's nineteenth-century heyday, turned to romanticism and poetry.
Central European Modernism, in the wake of "an especially ecstatic strain of baroque art" and then "the moralizing idyllicism of Biedermeier" and the region's great Romantic poetry, turned to rationalism and the novel. (In this, as Kundera discusses in some of the book's most interesting sections, it reveals unsuspected affinities with the postwar Latin American and Caribbean traditions.) Second, he implies, the very situation of the "small nations" gives them a "humorous" perspective denied to their big, blundering brothers. Hasek's great antihero, Kundera says, is a deserter: not literally, because Svejk pretends to go off to World War I with parodic good cheer, but morally, because of his "total indifference toward the great collective conflict." He refuses to take it seriously, "to grant meaning to the battles of his contemporaries," "to see a tragic grandeur in massacres." If Svejk is a deserter, then so is Hasek, and Kundera, and all the small nations eternally conscripted into the wars of the great powers, dragged behind on the road to nowhere. It's the kind of situation that makes you die laughing.
In the work of the Central Europeans, Kundera has said elsewhere, the history of the novel comes full circle, back to the all-dissolving laughter of Cervantes and Sterne. But here he foresees the end of that history: of the European arts, of the age of innovation, skepticism, individualism and the consciousness of artistic continuity. By the close of the essay, its title has acquired a new cast. This sense of cultural doom is not new; Kundera has always raged, often brilliantly, against the superficiality and conformism of contemporary life. But it's still a very narrow view.
As he shows in his appreciation of New World developments, art in Europe may be exhausted, but the European artistic traditions remain vital. He is also more ignorant than he has a right to be, if he's going to make pronouncements about the contemporary state of cultural memory, of developments within the academy. He says, for example, that novels are too long to be read properly, since images evoked at the beginning will be forgotten by the time a reader gets to the end; in Testaments Betrayed he argued that the only proper way to read a novel is to reread it, only nobody does that anymore. Well, academics do it, and if they're worth anything they teach their students to do likewise. I'm the last person to expect Kundera to immerse himself in academic criticism, but he isn't entitled to pretend it doesn't exist. Most of it is pretty bad, but that doesn't give him a license to ignore the good stuff, and even in the academy, even today, there's some very good stuff.
What's coming to an end, devolving into repetition, is not the novel, but what Kundera has to say about the novel. It gives me no pleasure to point this out, but there is very little here he hasn't said before and said better, most of it in The Art of the Novel, some of it in Testaments Betrayed, his other book-length essay. The Curtain is certainly well worth reading for anyone who doesn't know those other works. It is witty and brisk and very smart, like all of his writing. But it falls far short of The Art of the Novel, not only because he has so little new to say but because the earlier work was produced in the full flush of his novelistic career.
I suspect that there may be a little dissonance between the book and the reviewer in terms of worldviews, but I'll have to read The Curtain to know that for sure. When given a choice, I tend to side with the brilliant novelist and not with the young and unknown associate professor from Yale, until I am proven wrong.
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