The Curtain
by Milan Kundera
Faber ₤12.99, 256 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤9.99

One of Milan Kundera’s best-known novels, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, begins unconventionally, not with reported speech or narrative scene-setting, but with an exposition of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return - apparently delivered in Kundera’s own voice. This is only the first of several such authorial intrusions in the book. Kundera’s other novels are the same: long on commentary and discursive digression.

The Curtain, which forms a trilogy with Kundera’s earlier non-fiction books The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, is in part a defence of this novelistic method. It needs defending because, as Kundera acknowledges, frequent “meditative interpolations” in a novel strike many readers as alien to the form, or at least not “essential” to it.

Since the middle of the 19th century, it has been widely assumed that a novel must include both attentive description and psychological realism. The author’s opinions should be kept out of sight. Good style announces itself by its tact and discretion, in the choice of the telling detail and in the attentiveness with which it listens in on the thoughts of characters.

It wasn’t always like this, however. Kundera reminds us that the great novelists of the 18th century, Laurence Sterne or Henry Fielding for example, knew nothing of free indirect speech or interior monologue. Fielding didn’t “put a microphone to the thoughts going through his characters’ heads” and was forever interrupting his stories to comment on their progress. Nor did he go in for much description - Kundera compares the uncertain geography of Fielding’s London with Balzac’s Paris, in which all the streets have names.

Kundera is interested in Fielding’s way of looking at his characters. Instead of inhabiting their minds, he sizes them up and observes them from the outside, often delivering amusing verdicts on their psychology (though rarely describing their appearance: Kundera points out that we don’t learn the colour of Tom Brown’s eyes). Fielding analyses rather than sympathises.

The Curtain is full of insights such as this, which show Kundera to be a wonderful critic - or, more accurately, writer-critic. There is a difference, he says, between a novelist talking about the “art of the novel” and a professor “giving a discourse from his podium”.

Kundera’s tone is seductive, sly and, above all, personal: his excursions into literary history are a way of talking about himself and his art. His “personal history of the novel” is attenuated, eccentric even - but this book is a record of his elective affinities, not a work of scholarship. As well as Fielding and Sterne, Kundera’s idiosyncratic canon contains a number of European modernists who, Kafka aside, are little known in the English-speaking world, notably Hermann Broch, Witold Gombrowicz and Robert Musil.

In Kafka’s fiction, the exploration of character gives way to “existential analysis”, and “situation” usurps psychology. The protagonist in each of his novels finds himself in the same predicament, confronted by an immense bureaucratic apparatus.

Kundera sees what many adepts of the cult of Kafka have failed to see: that the essence of the Kafkaesque is undifferentiated bureaucratic time. K.’s demise at the end of The Castle, for instance, is not the result of cruelty but of exhaustion - he expires from all the hours spent arguing with functionaries in offices and waiting rooms.

However, a “curtain of preinterpretation” - assumptions about what is essential to the novel - makes it hard to appreciate what Musil and the others are up to. We are tempted to say that when a novelist introduces philosophy into his work he is simply borrowing from the professionals. We shouldn’t think, says Kundera, that the traffic between fiction and philosophy is all one way.

Novelists such as Musil or Gombrowicz certainly repudiate the dogmas of psychological realism, but they don’t abandon the novel. On the contrary, their thought can only be developed “novelistically”, by never leaving the “magic circle” of their characters’ lives.