Milan Kundera <The curtain>

I by chance found this book at a bookstore, too. (It is an impulse purchase that most of the books I have bought were at a bookstore.) I bought this just because of the two words, 'Milan Kundera,' and 'essay,' on the book cover. I simply thought then. 'Oh, this is an essay Kundera wrote about himself. Maybe on the daily life!'  

My thought was wrong; I read it after coming back home, but oh my, it was an essay that manages the art and history of the novel. This book began with The Consciousness of Continuity using Beethoven's anecdote.

This essay could be very interested to you if you have a literary interest and a little knowledge. But if not, you had better not read this. Of course it is not absolute as if I have read this in spite of the lack of knowledge.

If you want to imagine the style of this essay, see the essays of Susan Sontag. They don't say about their experiences of child or love between man and woman. There is an abstraction. If you have an interest in such things or sometimes want to feel his insights beyond the sense of a story, this book will be an appropriate choice.

Here, the curtain is an obstacle covering the truth. Kundera writes that novels are important to us because they get to the soul of things, and they tear the curtain showing us the world as it really is. What the book is saying is that: the novel accomplishes its purpose through to show its readers their own lives. I think If you could get that, that will do.