[Philip Roth is credited with bringing Kundera's works to the attention of the English-speaking public. The essay from which this excerpt is taken was originally published as the introduction to Kundera's Laughable Loves, 1974.]

I would think that … [Milan Kundera] would prefer to find a readership in the West that was not drawn to his fiction because he is a writer who is oppressed by a Communist regime, especially since Kundera's political novel. The Joke, happens to represent only an aspect of his wide-ranging intelligence and talent. (pp. 203-04)

But having written The Joke, Kundera, for all his wide-ranging interests, now finds himself an enemy of the state and nothing more—ironically enough, in a position very much like the protagonist of The Joke, whose error it is as a young Communist student to send a teasing postcard to his girl friend, making fun of her naïve political...