The best part of Milan Kundera’s new book celebrating the novel, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), which you guilelessly review (“Deep Convictions,” March 10, 2007), is its title. His heroes—Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Kafka, Joyce, Gombrowicz, and Broch—are heroes of the past. The novel is long dead, and Kundera cannot but be painfully aware of it. Why else celebrate an art form hatched in the Renaissance? Minus his title, Kundera has little to offer on the novel’s future. For there will be none. In fact, there can be none. True, novels will be written ever anew even after the curtain has fallen, but they will be stillborn. Just like landscapes and portraits. Or sonnets. And operas. Sadly, your review is innocent of all this. As though everything is fine and dandy in the world of art.