Milan Kundera's "The Curtain"
Pretty much finished with the selection of Pinter's plays (volume 4): just a few more pages of Family Voices. Started Kundera's The Curtain (forgot that I had it). It's subtitled An Essay in Seven Parts. I read his The Art of the Novel years ago; and a big chunk of his fiction years before that.
Haven't gotten too far into it yet (though like many of his recent books, it's a shorty), but I thoroughly enjoyed "The Beauty of Death" which starts with the question: "Why does Anna Karenina kill herself?" and compares Tolstoy and Joyce: "Tolstoy and Joyce were haunted by the same obsession: to seize what occurs in a person's head during a present moment and a moment later will be gone forever. But there is a difference: with his interior monologue, Tolstoy examines not, as Joyce will do later, an ordinary, banal day, but instead the decisive moments of his heroine's life. And that is much harder, for the more dramatic, unusual, grave a situation is, the more the person describing it tends to minimize its concrete qualities, to neglect its nonlogical prose and substitute the implacable and simplistic logic of tragedy. Tolstoy's examination of the prose of a suicide is therefore a great achievement, a "discovery" that has no parallel in the history of the novel and never will have.
Haven't gotten too far into it yet (though like many of his recent books, it's a shorty), but I thoroughly enjoyed "The Beauty of Death" which starts with the question: "Why does Anna Karenina kill herself?" and compares Tolstoy and Joyce: "Tolstoy and Joyce were haunted by the same obsession: to seize what occurs in a person's head during a present moment and a moment later will be gone forever. But there is a difference: with his interior monologue, Tolstoy examines not, as Joyce will do later, an ordinary, banal day, but instead the decisive moments of his heroine's life. And that is much harder, for the more dramatic, unusual, grave a situation is, the more the person describing it tends to minimize its concrete qualities, to neglect its nonlogical prose and substitute the implacable and simplistic logic of tragedy. Tolstoy's examination of the prose of a suicide is therefore a great achievement, a "discovery" that has no parallel in the history of the novel and never will have.
Comments