pith and perfuffle

Imagine my delight, on dipping into a review of Milan Kundera's new book - The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (by Kevin Jackson, in the Sunday Times) - to find this gem of an opening paragraph:

'Alan Bennett once wrote and performed in a beautifully observed parody of television arts documentaries — long since wiped by some wretched BBC jobsworth — in which he played an earnest, working-class novelist from the north, now a tax exile on the Med. The duty of the novelist, Bennett’s character explained in hushed, lilting tones, was to seek out and extract the very essence of things: or, as he put it, “to take the pith out of reality”.'

At this point the Baroque happiness is a complete and wondrous object. And except for Jackson's unfortunate need to spell out the joke, the rest of the paragraph is also a bagatelle of delight:

'Milan Kundera would have enjoyed this remark, whether or not he caught the naughty play on words, since in his view the distinguishing mark of the true novelist from Rabelais and Cervantes onwards has been the wish to tear down the curtains of prefabricated illusion (hence the mildly cryptic title of this essay) and to expose the world “in all the comic nakedness of its prose”.'