Taking up John’s challenge, I suggest a detour into the world of fiction. My recommendations are two works by Milan Kundera, who deserves the Nobel Prize in literature more than anyone else who has won it recently.
The Joke
This was Kundera’s first novel, which is amazing given its depth of understanding and elegance of style. A student in the Soviet Union in the 1960s tries to impress a beautiful young commrade and, in making a clumsy joke to get her attention (he tells her that “optimism is the opiate of the people”), is swept into the gears of the totalitarian state. Be sure to get the version pictured above, all other English translations, especially the original, are bad.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I throw this in because its title scares away many people, who assume it’s a nihilistic romance. It is a love story, and much more, but hardly nihilistic. A playboy surgeon who is one of the best physicians in the country returns to Prague after the Soviet invasion of 1968. (He does this for a woman.) He writes a throw-away opinion piece for a local newspaper, which draws the attention of Soviet officials, who try to force him to recant one small part of it. Though it would be easy to do so, he refuses. Because he won’t falsely accuse the paper’s editor, who the Russians really are after, of doctoring his piece, his life is diverted to a strange and unproductive path where he winds up doing odd jobs on a farm — while people in Prague die for lack of competent physicians.
