is there a way to use the curses svn client, or another tool, to browse a svn repository?

"You can at least list the contents of the repository directories using:

svn ls svn://example.com/svn/trunk

You can also do this with any directory in the tree, so you can use it to find the section you want to check out before doing a full-checkout of a directory.

If you need to look at any of the files in a particular directory, you can just checkout the files in that directory without recursing using:

svn co --depth files svn://example.com/svn/trunk/path/to/files/"