Posted by joffre on 26/3/2008, 14:25:42
72.147.248.249
I've just finished this long (168p.) essay by Kundera. I like his essays very much. I like his novels very well too. Has anyone else read any of the essays? I don't know of anyone who better puts into words the things I think or feel about literature. I wish I had his powers of perception. There are very few people I would rather meet and talk with.
In The Curtain, as in the other essays, The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, he returns frequently to the earliest practitioners of the novel: Cervantes, Rabelais, Fielding. He writes about the development of the novel. He believes it needs to be studied not in a national but in a world context. He writes, "... it was to Rabelais that Laurence Sterne was reacting, it was Sterne who set off Diderot, it was from Cervantes that Fielding drew constant inspiration, it was against Fielding that Stendhal measured himself...." It seems to me that Fielding is the most obvious influence on Kundera himself.
I thought I would list the novels mentioned in the essay, but there are too many. Besides the authors I mentioned above, Kundera writes much about Flaubert, Kafka, Musil, Broch, Gombrowicz, Tolstoy, Proust, and others.
I would so much like to be able to ask Kundera about other novels, but perhaps he would not be able to tell me so much about any others. Somebody said something about how much we would know if we only knew five novels really well. Does anyone know the quote I mean?
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