[Sillaycheg]

I am going to seek this book out (hi,saliotomas), because of the content. I hope that those who say that it is too static are wrong, because obviously a happy blend of form and content means that the reader enjoys the movement of the book, but the author still gets various salient points across.

What is important about the theme of the book as described by Stewart, at the beginning here, is that it is the reality of tens of thousands of of intelligent, middle-class people who objected to the idiotic Soviet system of semi-poverty and fear that was being imposed on them, got out or were thrown out, only to experience utter dissillusionment when they return to their liberated countries. The world had moved on.

Whether you come from Prague, Tallinn, Krak?w, Vilnius, Budapest, Bucharest, Belgrade, Sofia, Berlin, or wherever else in the former Soviet bloc, it must be painful to realise that all the things that the self-sacrificial idealists of the 1960-1980s were striving for, i.e. a normal life as we know it in Western Europe, are now so normal there too that the populace takes them for granted. Also that spivs and the mafia have moved in where the (spivs and the mafia of the) Communist Party operated from 1945-1991.

These basic truths should be understood by anyone dealing with Eastern & Central Europe and reading novels alluding to the zone. So I can forgive Kundera if he becomes preachy or essa?stic. It's worth it to get the mentality across to readers in Western Euope, who lived in a different world for half a century.