Trumpet for lost voices

Encounter

Then came 1968 and the Soviet crackdown on an incipient revolution. The choking life became intolerable and Kundera was eventually to move to France where he took out French citizenship.

But now that that seemingly interminable polity has concluded, from where does the writer’s recalcitrance rage? What prevailed throughout was his resistance to a cloying control exercised by at first, naked totalitarianism and later, oppressive regimes of any kind. His truly memorable totem against all such activity – the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting – serves as a warning and as a cultural watershed. In his new book of essays, he takes up the theme in as strong a vein as ever.