Books: A Handful of Lust

LIFE IS ELSEWHERE by MILAN KUNDERA Translated by PETER KUSSI 289 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

LAUGHABLE LOVES

by MILAN KUNDERA

Translated by SUZANNE RAPPAPORT 242 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

It is clear now to thoughtful members of the literary apparat that a critic who praises an Iron Curtain writer does so at considerable risk to his reputation as a subtle fellow. Some variant of the skepticism now being directed at Solzhenitsyn is sure to tar the enthusiast. "A great soul, certainly," it will be said, "with great lumps on his head from those rubber truncheons, but a great writer ... ?" The message is stern: under an oppressive state, all artists may be persecuted, but not all those persecuted are artists.

Thus the case of the Czech comic novelist Milan Kundera comes up at a time when to be persecuted in Czechoslovakia is not a clear advantage. Kundera's work was banned in Czechoslovakia not long after his novel The Joke was published in 1967. It was about a youth who innocently wrote a postcard to his girl friend that teased her about her dedication to Communism. His little joke got him seven years at hard labor. As Philip Roth notes in his introduction to Kundera's short-story collection Laughable Loves, the author also paid. Now 45, Kundera lives in the provincial city of Brno, stripped of his teaching job at the Prague Film School, without the right to travel abroad and denied all but 10% of the royalties his books earn in Europe.

Roth's championing of Kundera is not surprising. Both writers can be both savage and painfully hilarious about the tyrannies of politics and sex. At one point in the novel Life Is Elsewhere, Kundera tells of a poetry night at a policemen's convention. "Yes," says one of the cops during the question period, "all the poets were first-rate. But had anyone noticed that despite the fact that approximately 33 poems had been presented (assuming an average of three poems per poet), not a single one of them dealt with the national security force, even indirectly?"

There is a Czech tradition of satirizing mindless officialdom that goes back to Kafka's The Trial and Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk. But this is not Kundera's main theme, and there is no reason to think that his work would be wholly different if his country's absentee landlords were still the Habsburgs, not the Soviets.

The novel is a sly and merciless lampoon of revolutionary romanticism, and it deals with lyric poetry as a species of adolescent neurosis. The hero is an unpleasant young man named Jaromil, whose every childhood uncertainty has been marveled at by his crazed mother as evidence of an artistic soul. Out of resentment of her coarse husband, who hung his smelly socks on her beloved alabaster statuette of Apollo, this monstrous mother determined to make her infant son a poet.