The Curtain

There’s something about the way Milan Kundera writes about literature that I find really appealing. I really enjoyed his first two volumes of literary criticism, The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed. I think it has to do with his love of literature comes out through his writing. This can also be said of his latest work of nonfiction, The Curtain, which I recently read. I was turned onto Flaubert by Kundera and in his latest he praised Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos De Laclos, which I bought on a whim since I enjoyed the film version so much, so it has moved up to the on deck spot on my list of novels. He is also a great fan of Don Quixote, which I still haven’t gotten around to reading and certainly must. Others we hold in esteem include Carlos Fuentes, Franz Kafka, and Robert Musil. I think his writing style is also very unpretentious and inclusive. I really enjoyed this short book of criticism. It gave me a lot of ideas for caching up with classical literature that I haven’t gotten to yet.