Ariel goes to the police

Karl Miller

• Life is elsewhere by Milan Kundera, translated by Peter Kussi
  Faber, 311 pp, £9.95, November 1986, ISBN 0 571 14560 4
• My First Loves by Ivan Klima, translated by Ewald Oser
  Chatto, 164 pp, £9.95, November 1986, ISBN 0 7011 3014 8

Revolution, literature and love, and the roads and side-roads which join them together, are concerns of Kundera and Klima, whose name is a further concern of Kundera’s, and is used for the uxorious philanderer of his novel The Farewell Party. With the arrival of these two Czech writers Central Europe’s roman à K has taken a new turn. There is a sense in which the hero of the latest of Kundera’s novels to appear in Britain is also the hero of Klima’s collection of stories. Revolution, and its betrayal by a regime which both prescribes and proscribes literature, are described in the literature to which both men contribute. Both are interested in the subject of remembering and forgetting. In the books they write, music is heard in country places – trumpets, fiddles, the cimbalom – and love shows its face in country hotels, pleasant places, set down beside a stretch of water.