Volume 21, Number 13 · August 8, 1974
People in a Trap
By Neal Ascherson
Life Is Elsewhere
by Milan Kundera, translated by Peter Kussi
Knopf, 289 pp., $6.95
Laughable Loves
by Milan Kundera, translated by Suzanne Rappaport, with an introduction by Philip Roth
Knopf, 242 pp., $6.95
Good Men Still Live!
by Alan Levy
O'Hara, 315 pp., $8.95
The Case Worker
by George Konrád, translated by Paul Aston
Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 173 pp., $6.95
Extraordinary Czech novels, written in the late Sixties, keep coming from Western publishers. Ludvik Vaculík's The Axe and then The Guinea Pigs were translated during the last few years; Milan Kundera's The Joke was published in 1969, two years after it appeared in Czechoslovakia. Now we have in English his Life Is Elsewhere—unpublished in Prague or indeed anywhere in its original Czech—which first reached the public in a French translation last year and won the Prix Médicis for the best foreign novel of 1973. Invasion, repression, official abuse, and loss of employment have not silenced either of these obstinate Moravians, for there is more to come: Vaculik is finishing a new novel and a third work by Kundera (described in the Gallimard blurb for Life Is Elsewhere as the 'third panel of a literary cycle') is currently being translated into French.
Review, 3148 words
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