Dear Milan Kundera:
About four years ago, a copy of the bound galleys of your novel. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, came into my office for review. As a magazine editor I get so many books every week in that form that unless I have a special reason I rarely do more than glance at their titles. In the case of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting I had no such special reason. By 1980 your name should have been more familiar to me, but in fact I had only a vague impression of you as an East European dissident—so vague that, I am now ashamed to confess, I could not have said for certain which country you came from: Hungary? Yugoslavia? Czechoslovakia? Perhaps even Poland? [In a footnote, Podhoretz comments: "Since then you have taught me that the term East Europe is wrong because the countries in question belong to the West and that we should speak instead of Central Europe. But in 1980 I did not yet understand this."]
This is a free excerpt of 171 words. There are 5,333 words (approx.
18 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Kundera, Milan 1929–: Critical Essay by Norman Podhoretz Access Pass.
