The Stories We Tell

The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, by Milan Kundera (HarperCollins, 176 pp., $22.95)

THE chief concern of this, Milan Kundera’s third volume of essays, is the modern novel. His own novels of course might be called a giant essay on the political and cultural life of the modern era; the best known, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), opens with a discussion of Nietzsche’s myth of eternal return, and the entire sixth book of that novel is an essay on kitsch. He takes seriously what Georg Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist literary critic, had to say in Theory of the Novel: “The need for reflexion is the deepest melancholy of every great and genuine novel.”