Volume 38, Number 4 · February 14, 1991
Laughter in the Dark
By John Banville
New World Avenue and Vicinity
by Tadeusz Konwicki, translated by Walter Arndt
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 212 pp., $24.95
Too Loud a Solitude
by Bohumil Hrabal, translated by Michael Henry Heim
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 98 pp., $16.95
Helping Verbs of the Heart
by Péter Esterházy, translated by Michael Henry Heim
Grove Weidenfeld, 111 pp., $15.95
Woe betide the writer who finds himself cast as a hero. In the West, where even artists do not take art seriously, we look upon the 'dissident' as somehow more authentic than we could ever hope to be, with our word processors and benevolent editors and Guggenheim Foundations. The dissident, of course, is always someone who dissents elsewhere, 'over there,' behind the Curtain or the Wall or under Table Mountain. Compared to them, to these brave ones, our rebels seem like noisy children drumming their fists and refusing to be good. How can we be serious, we ask, how can we be truly grown-up, without the burden of political oppression, without a great cause to which we might lend our singing voices? So it is that at times when it was fashionable to be of the soft left, for instance in the Thirties and the Sixties, we paid fealty to figures such as Solzhenitsyn—a brave, perhaps even a great man, but no lover of liberal causes.
Review, 3676 words
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