The Farewell Party [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Speaking of the voices that have emerged in Czechoslovakia since the Prague Spring, Jean-Paul Sartre once remarked that they make us ill at ease. He was writing most particularly of voices raised on political and social matters, voices that'overturn our clichés and challenge our assumptions. But this same sense of discomfort is also aroused, oddly enough, by the lighthearted fiction of Milan Kundera. Now that a substantial body of his work has been read and acclaimed by foreign readers, it is as difficult as ever to place him within a definite literary tradition. We are made doubly ill at ease when his fiction persists in engaging issues that the novel has abandoned—issues of history and man's place in it—and yet does so in a fashion utterly unlike that of Sartre or André Malraux, who also developed the novel as an inquiry into man's place in history. Where their novels worked out of a series of assertions, Kundera's fiction is composed of a series of questions about la condition humaine, questions couched so thoroughly in his comic milieu that they seem at first glance anything but philosophical or historically specific. This method is much less the reticence of a writer under wraps than the result of a vision that depicts its sampling of humanity in such intrinsically modest, and eventually comic, terms that the occasion for overt philosophizing scarcely dares to surface. It is difficult to think of Kundera as a descendant of these French writers, difficult because the closeness of his concerns to theirs is partly masked by the difference in artistry and tone. He is much more the novelist than they, and the laughter that gives his work its sophisticated edge is foreign to Sartre's brand of Marxism and existentialism. One might also say it was forged in a laboratory that ran rather different experiments on the human animal than have been available to writers of Western Europe. The sophistication is, as always, the product of this extensive political experience in the hands of a refining intellect. Not that one finds much direct reference to the repression and surveillance of everyday life in Kundera's work—his best fiction