Le Rideau

Le Rideau continues the two earlier essays, L’Art du roman and Les Testaments trahis. Kundera here deploys his gift for parable: “A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantès sent Don Quixote traveling and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the errant knight in the nakedness of its prose.” A vigorous defense of the novel, endorsing Gombrowicz’s view that a writer incapable of speaking about his own books is not “a complete writer.”