A real treat to read! This book contains reviews/critiques of all of Kundera's major works begining with his first novel, The Joke, up to 1996's Slowness with heavy emphasis placed on analysis of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The highlight of this collection are the four interviews with Kundera. He is a fantastic interviewee and we, of course, gain further insight into the workings of his mind. To maximize enjoyment of this collection I recommend that the reader be familiar with all of Kundera's output.

This book is about a young man, Milan, in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia during the 1980's. His father is imprisoned as a dissident, Milan is a non-conformist and the Communist state is not his friend. Milan is in turns a hospital orderly and a hardware store clerk, when he is working. The story is intensely personal involving the reader in Milan's thoughts and feelings as he is confronted by the shocks of his eventful life. The story provides insight into the dreary and oppressive life during that period, but more importantly the author is able to make the reader feel the impact of the sometimes ordinary, sometimes traumatic events Milan experiences, and to make his discoveries, joys and anguish our own. It is philosophical as the main character tries at all turns to extract meaning and personal guidance from what he witnesses. It is also very much a love story and shows the great awe and mystery he finds in his girlfriend, Tania, and other women. This is not always pleasant to read but is gripping in the way that it unfolds his hazardous life without disclosing where it is going, if indeed it is going anywhere.

Milan, a twenty-something Bratislavian native, comes of age in this novel of life under Soviet rule. His father, imprisoned for political dissidence, is the reason that our hero is forbidden to go to college and is thus sentenced to a life of toilsome jobs. Divided into 3 chronological parts, we watch our hero: forever jogging and forever thinking--mature into a young man, but change and grow bitter in the process as well. A lot is packed into Simecka's slim novel. Milan's love affair with Tania is the only thing that keeps him going at times as he attempts to cope with his father's incarceration and his mother's chronic depression. The reader gets to learn a lot about Bratislava, warts and all, like the smog being so thick there that getting a tan is nigh impossible at times, or that the smog even prevents one from seeing the stars at night. Perhaps these starless skies are a metaphor for life under communist rule and how it crushes the human spirit. At first, we believe that Milan is irrepressible, but by story's end, he fares no better than the rest of his comrades. We get to see the absurdity of the socialist healthcare system; the chronic shortage of basic goods; the rampant alcoholism. Milan tells us what it is like to live in a bugged apartment, to be under constant surveillance and to have to have a current proof-of-employment stamp in one's Citizen Identification Booklet. The topical references in the story make it interesting as well. In Part 2, Milan tells of a time when he and his brother travel to Warsaw in the early '80s to see the new freedoms of Solidarity or like the casual remark in Part 3 (entitled "Gin") about the arrest of some of the Charter 77 members. (Hence, it is only fitting that Czech President Vaclav Havel pen the foreward to this book). By Part 3, still a young man, we see Milan beaten down, dispirted. His comment that the Czechoslovak nation has "fallen apart" comes as no surprise and at the very end of the novel, tiredly admits "The State has turned me to steel." Well done, Mr. Simecka. Now write and tell us what Bratislavan life is like now after a decade free of Soviet oppression!

Dr. Peter Petro has written a highly readable and entertaining history of 1000 years of Slovak literature. It's a slim volume-only 156 pp-and reads not as a mere compendium of historical facts and titles, but as an informative and fun learning experience. Hey--anything that can tear me away from my habit of reading only contemporary literature has to be pretty compelling. Petro made the different periods of Slovak literature come alive for me. Unlike Kirschbaum's 1975 Slovak Language & Literature, which divides the literature by the periods of literary movements (Bernolak, Safarik, Stur...), Petro groups literary works into artistic movements and truly makes the Medieval and Renaissance periods et al vital and interesting times to read about. After reading the fascinating chapter on Medieval works, I found myself, like Petro, in sympathy with medieval man. A must-read is the legend of St. Svorad and Benedikt (pp.10-11) as well as the Janosik myth. We learn not only about Slovak literature but its' music as well as the author includes info (and lyrics) on the different genres of the lyric song. I'm inspired to read works by the "best Slovak poet" (Lani) and the "best hymnwriter" (Tranovsky)--neither genre one I'd even considered before. The book's description of Kralova Hola, "headquarters of baroque writer Janosik," makes me want to visit this mystical place! My knowledge of the famed Anton Bernolak (1762-1813) pretty slim, I'd always considered him to be something of a saint but after reading about his treatment of some of his peers, have now a different outlook on him. I like the way Petro puts things like "A revolution is truly a ride on a tiger's back." All in all, I found this book to be personally enriching as well as informative. It makes me yearn for more Slovak literature to be translated into English--think of all we're missing out on right now! A bibliography of English and other language sources is included in an index in the back.