SOURCE: "Small Novel, Large Stories," in The New York Times Book Review, July 28, 1974, p. 7.

An American expatriate living in England, Theroux vividly captures in his fiction and travel books the experiences of displaced individuals and the cultures of exotic lands. An important motif in his work concerns the outsider who can discover his identity only in a foreign land. In the following review, Theroux argues that Kundera's stories were shaped by the political context in which they were written.

When he wants to annoy the cultural commissars on his occasional visits to the Soviet Union, the superb Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal—southern Anatolia's William Faulkner—says, "Well, Socialist Realism is basically anti-Marxist. . . . " It is also, in the right hands, a great recipe for comedy: The po-faced deflation in bureaucratic gibberish, the rigidity that seems designed to collapse amid howls of laughter from its own weight. Understandably, the Czechs...