Below, O'Brien analyzes "play," intrusive authorship, and the significance of history in Kundera's fiction, particularly in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and, in a brief postscript, Immortality.

In the following essay, Adams highlights the way Kundera's folk heritage informs his concept of identity in both his theoretical writings and his fiction, suggesting reasons for his international appeal.

In the following essay, Sturdivant assesses Kundera's use of sexual intercourse in his fiction to portray "the utter meaninglessness of the human condition."

In the following essay, O'Brien singles out the stories "Hitchhiking Game" and "Edward and God" as illustrations of Kundera's "ability to expose the misogynistic male psychology. "

Below, Gaughan discusses the purpose of laughter and comedy in "Nobody Will Laugh," especially as they relate to the individual and society.

In the following essay, Eagleton considers the various ideological conflicts that inform Kundera's fiction.

In the following essay, Sturdivant suggests that Kundera uses sexuality as a means of expressing the futility and desperation of life.

Novels of protest—protest against oppression and injustice—have invariably taken the form of brutal realism, from a Zola to a Solzhenitsyn, since they seek to document horrors with a wealth of detail and fact. But questions of form apart, since the realistic novel is an "old" form, how long can one go on piling detail on detail, in a mounting demonstration of evil? Writers of protest have tried other modes, such as satire, yet satire requires that a reader have more than a passin...

The author of Milan Kundera: A Voice from Central Europe (1981), Porter is an English educator specializing in Russian literature. In the following excerpt, Porter discerns an overarching pattern in the stories of Laughable Loves.

In the review below, Hutchinson addresses the main themes of Testaments Betrayed.

In the following review of The Art of the Novel, Meisel focuses on Kundera's treatment of formal devices of the novel genre.

Kitsch is the enemy of every artist, of course, but it has special menace for the artist who has made his way out of the abyss of "totalitarian kitsch" (as Kundera calls it), only to find himself peering into the chasm of Western anticommunist kitsch. Kundera, who left Czechoslovakia in 1975, after he was expelled from the Communist party for the second time and could no longer publish or teach there, now lives in Paris and works in an increasingly—what to call it?—abstract, surr...

Broyard was an influential American literary critic who, during his career, contributed book reviews to the New York Times, served as editor of the New York Times Book Review, and lectured on sociology and literature at the New School for Social Research. In the following review, he finds Kundera's stories overrated and merely "passable. "

A prominent and controversial figure in contemporary American letters, Roth draws heavily upon his Jewish upbringing and his life as an author to explore his predominant thematic concerns—the search for self-identity, conflicts between traditional and contemporary moral values, and the relationship between fiction and reality. The scatalogical content of some of his works and his satiric portraits of Jewish life have inspired a considerable amount of critical debate. Roth wrote the introduction to t...

An English poet, novelist, and critic, Enright is sometimes associated with a group of authors—Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Philip Larkin, Robert Conquest, and Elizabeth Jennings—whose concerted dissent from tradition earned them the informal moniker The Movement. Well known as a literary critic, Enright's reviews have appeared in the New Statesman, Encounter, and London Magazine. In the following review, he focuses on Kundera's depiction of deceit and manipulation in relationships...

Refined in the laboratory of social oppression,… Kundera's knowledge of personal freedom leads inexorably to the comic perception of victims of surveillance who are also, in their private ways, master practitioners of the art. So sophisticated is Kundera's rendering of this perception that one would have to look at 18th-century comedies of manners to find comedy and gulling on the scale of that in … The Farewell Party. Here in the festive atmosphere of a health spa and fertility ...

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.

In the following review of Testaments Betrayed, von Kunes focuses on Kundera's views on the arts of Kafka and Janácek.