When a first-rate novel comes to us from Communist Europe, we do not want it sterilized and packaged; we want it raw. Last year, the Czechoslovakian author of The Joke wrote from Prague to the London Times Literary Supplement, protesting that his British publisher had "broken up" the novel, cutting at will and forming a mosaic of selected episodes….

"All my life long," wrote Kundera, very boldly, "I have been protesting against the mutilation of works of art in the name of an ideological doctrine as practiced in the socialist countries of Europe." The art discussed in this novel, as a symbol and as a thing in itself, is Moravian folk music. Kundera wrote a chapter about it, with musical examples. "Goodness me, how boring!" said London. So the British version omitted the chapter altogether. Surprisingly [the] American version follows suit, although in other respects it is closer...