SOURCE: Baranczak, Stanislaw. “Life Is Elsewhere.” New Republic 205, no. 5 (29 July 1991): 36-9.

In the following review, Baranczak compares and contrasts Love and Garbage with Milan Kundera's Immortality.

There must be something wrong with me or with the fiction of Central Europe, if these two very different books by two very different authors, each one of them hailed as the crowning achievement of a leading representative of the cutting-edge section of that cutting-edge area of contemporary literature that Central European fiction supposedly is, leave me each with the feeling that there is no edge to do any cutting.

Love and Garbage and Immortality landed at the same time on my lap by a coincidence of American publishing. The only two things that these novels seem to have in common is that they were both originally written in Czech, and that both represent the latest stages in two important writers' careers...