Satire rarely translates well. It depends not only on common assumptions (no sweat in the particular case of Pavel Kohout's critique of Soviet oppression) but, more problematically, on a common shock-threshold. So White Book presents a dilemma. I wanted to find it a courageously funny act of protest by this Czech author against a regime whose response to such acts is (as the fiction reminds us) notably humourless. But after a few pages it reads predictably, a story that suffers in translation by comparison with the Western satiric fantasies it emulates (Pynchon, Vonnegut, Brautigan).

The first problem is that east of Berlin everyone needs something blunter than a rapier to get his ideas home…. We're in a particularly bad position to enjoy communist anti-establishment irony because the capitalist variety is—in proportion to the deviousness of its targets—so much subtler. Besides, in the Soviet case we don't...