It is a time of massive upheaval, chillingly convinced of its own progressiveness, when to voice a word of doubt or caution is automatically to be unorthodox and, most treacherously, ‘negative’. The Joke, Kundera’s first novel, is set in postwar Czechoslovakia, when Stalinist communism was being established and even embraced, particularly by the young. Kundera’s novels, one could argue, are more timely and relevant than ever: take The Joke from 1967, which in the UK at least has surely found its moment, transcending its Czech setting and with things to tell us urgently about the here and now. For those of us who grew up reading Kundera’s work – that entrancing mixture of playfulness, high seriousness and, above all, irony – it was frustrating to see him so casually dismissed.
Jonathan Coe wrote in the Guardian of Kundera’s ‘problematic sexual politics’, while Alex Preston said that even Kundera’s greatest novels – The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1974) – seemed ‘a little more adolescent and posturing… 20 years later’.
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