[An American expatriate living in England, Theroux vividly captures in his fiction and travel books the experiences of displaced individuals and the cultures of exotic lands. An important motif in his work concerns the outsider who can discover his identity only in a foreign land. In the following review, Theroux argues that Kundera's stories were shaped by the political context in which they were written.]

When he wants to annoy the cultural commissars on his occasional visits to the Soviet Union, the superb Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal—southern Anatolia's William Faulkner—says, "Well, Socialist Realism is basically anti-Marxist. . . . " It is also, in the right hands, a great recipe for comedy: The po-faced deflation in bureaucratic gibberish, the rigidity that seems designed to collapse amid howls of laughter from its own weight. Understandably, the Czechs are embarrassed by the attention shown to their deflations especially after the heroic fiasco of "the Prague Spring." And Philip Roth points out in his introduction to Laughable Loves how skeptical Czech writers are when a foreigner expresses interest in them, as if the predicament is more important than the work and that any outside expression of praise can only be patronizing. Roth quotes the Czech novelist Ludvik Vaculik's lament about foreign critics judging Czech writing according to how it "settles accounts with illusions about socialism."

"I would think," Roth writes, "that like Holub and Vaculik, Milan Kundera too 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. . . ." Yes, but it is as hard to ignore the origins of the comedy in Kundera's fiction as to set aside the circumstances and concentrate on the purity of diction in the poetry of Ho Chi Minh or the Bard of Peking, who writes poems when he is not killing off his opposition.

The fact is that Kundera, who is a magnificent short-story writer and a reasonably good novelist (I am going on the evidence of Life Is Elsewhere; Roth has a high opinion of The Joke), depends for his effects on the ridiculous strictures set up by a Socialist government. You have first to assume that the hacks in the Czech Government believe they have created a Socialist paradise; after that, everything they do is funny. A writer who keeps his sanity long enough to ridicule his oppressors, who has enough hope left to make this ridicule into satire, must be congratulated. And Kundera's humor is impossible elsewhere. One can't imagine his particular situations growing out of anything but a combined anger and fascination with the cut-price Stalinists who have the whip-hand in Prague, "that city," he says, "of defenestration. . . ."

The stories are bound up with politics, and even when politics is never mentioned, as in "The Hitchhiking Game," it enters the story as a kind of fatigue: why else would this pair be behaving like this if it weren't for the fact that their famished imaginations are the result of political frustration? He is more specific in other stories, because his best humor always seems to be rooted in authority situations: in "Nobody Will Laugh" Mr. Klima is a wisecracking victim of the art wing of the party (who want him to praise a bad article); in "Edward and God," a comedy quite as good as any of Roth's, the jokes are based on official disbelief in God, and it is impossible to appreciate the complexity of the humor until one takes into account the whole attitude toward religion in a Marxist society. Only then does the wry figure of Edward, discovered blessing himself (because he wants to be a believer) become funny. . . .

Life Is Elsewhere is a small achievement next to Laughable Loves, the stories. Roth finds them "Chekhovian." I think he's wrong, but this is a measure of his enthusiasm, not a critical judgment, and I would be very surprised if a better collection of stories appeared this year.