The Curtain, By Milan Kundera

'A novelist talking about the art of the novel is not a professor giving a discourse from his podium ... He will talk about himself, but even more about other people, about novels of theirs that he loves and that have a secret presence in his work. According to his criteria of values, he will again trace out for you the whole past of the novel's history, and in so doing will give you some sense of his own poetics of the novel, one that belongs to him alone..." Milan Kundera's introduction to a sequence of reflections from Witold Gombrowicz is also a concise apologia for his own method in this persuasive, if sidelong, essay on the history and practice of novelism. A short and unapologetically personal thesis, The Curtain is a wonderful book to argue with: it is enviably quotable, at times infuriating, but rarely less than instructive.

Kundera is a Czech writer by birth and a French one only by adoption, and his "seven-part essay" is far less cluttered with playful Gallic intello-junk than a quick look at its chapter-headings ("The Frontier of the Implausible Is No Longer Under Guard", for example) might suggest. This goes for almost everything except the weird central image that he chooses to illustrate his discussion, of a "curtain of pre-interpretation" - a notional screen in front of mankind, embroidered with the sum total of man's efforts to interpret the world. The task of any artist worth his salt, says Kundera, is to tear down this curtain rather than simply repeating the truisms written on it. It was Cervantes who, by winding up Don Quixote and sending him tearing through the curtain, first caused the world to "open before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose". Thereafter, we're told, such destructive acts "echo and extend to every novel worthy of the name"; they are "the identifying sign of the art of the novel".

In other words: make it new, that fine Modernist exhortation. "Art is not a village band marching dutifully along at History's heels," writes Kundera. "It is there to create its own history." And he deftly sets out the increments by which this history evolved, neatly cataloguing, for instance, the move from the theatrical concentration of narrative event in Balzac and Dostoevsky to the rigorously catalogued quotidiana of Flaubert, then tracing the impulse through Joyce to the "anti-lyrical poetry" of Gombrowicz, Kafka and Musil. As with much in the book, this isn't a new argument, but Kundera accompanies his observations with such a striking wealth of idiosyncratic detail and offbeat reflection that new depths emerge.

An alternative title for this book might well be "Against Provincialism". In Kundera's formulation, this is "the inability (or the refusal) to see one's own culture in the large context". Both small and large nations are susceptible: whereas large countries consider their own literature to be so complete that they need pay no attention to what people write elsewhere, the small country "inculcates in its writer the conviction that he belongs to that place alone". Neither suits Kundera, who expounds the history of the European novel not as a sequence of discrete contemporaneous theories but as a running dialogue, a collaborative effort - Goethe's Weltliteratur. "Rabelais, ever undervalued by his compatriots, was never better understood than by a Russian, Bakhtin," he writes; "Dostoevsky by a Frenchman, Gide; Ibsen than by an Irishman, Shaw; Joyce than by an Austrian, Broch." Such a cross-pollinating impulse is one that stands now in danger of neglect, and Kundera, himself a man between countries and languages, is well placed to remind us of its truth.

Lists are always debatable, but the roster of crucial writers quoted here will inevitably stir partisan spirit in the reader. One can understand Kundera's attraction to what he calls the "Central European Pleiades" of Kafka, Broch, Gombrowicz and Musil - his own work both aspires to that tradition and draws freely from it - as well as his interest in writers whose work epitomises "the privileged sphere of analysis, lucidity, irony" that he considers the novel's most characteristic terrain. Still, it seems an oversight to omit Dickens from the list of pre-20th-century writers, and an idiosyncrasy to make no mention of, for instance, Beckett's prose later on.

These are tiny quibbles, though, because The Curtain has the inestimable advantage of making the reader think. In this it is large in import and encouragement beyond its elegant 160-odd pages. Most attractive of all, perhaps, are Kundera's deep and reasoned belief in the value of the novelist's profession and his utter withering scorn for the prizes-for-all cash-in that contemporary literature perpetually threatens to become. Aspiring Dan Browns, in particular, might cut out this Old Testament gem of a quotation and pin it up on the wall:

"Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional - thus not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious - is contemptible."