REVIEWS
Osiel, Mark J. & Koháková, Zuzana & Liehm, A. J. & Cohen, Mitchell & Levinson, Mark
THE JOKE, by Milan Kundera. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper & Row. 267 pp. $14.95. History has destroyed Central Europe. The great Central European novel has enthroned...
...In many ways, these words capture Arendt herself...
...Are we to assume that Gershom Scholem, perhaps the most important Jewish historian of the century and a severe critic of Eichmann in Jerusalem, did not "master" his past while Arendt did...
...The message, "DO NOT CROSS OUT," has been penciled in on the 16th questionnaire...
...Gruga's solution can be captured, if clumsily, in the notion of "bearing witness...
...He argues that we should regard the Soviet Union as a cornered bear, with massive internal problems, that needs to be deterred yet not provoked into an act of military desperation...
...Green's book is wideranging and intelligent...
...I have always been convinced that the paradoxes of history and private life have the same basic properties: Helena ends up in the hoax of the trap Ludvik has set for her...
...Lawrence is ridiculous...
...What change there has been, appreciable by all accounts, has not occurred overnight...
...The extremely vulnerable little nations of Central Europe felt it before others...
...One stresses the independent power of new ideas...
...5.95...
...One day Jan Chrysostom will speak out— he will tell the whole truth...
...President Fidel Castro, who attended all the baseball games in which the Cuban team participated, was said to have taken a personal interest in the matter...
...Only when the leadership of the Christian Democratic party and, finally, the bishops themselves became subject to attack by the regime did they begin to speak out publicly against the flagrant injustices and to assume a "prophetic" stance of open opposition...
...Gruga, like Eliot before him, has constructed a rich and tightly woven tapestry of allusions to historical events and documents, to cultural and religious conventions, to myth and even to graffiti...
...but remember, it is the wealthy who have the means to save and invest...
...On the other hand, Arendt was not a "self-hating Jew" or "anti-Israel," as some of her critics will have it...
...Machiavelli's uncritical use of Livy in The Discourses comes to mind and is, perhaps, a particularly appropriate parallel given Arendt's republicanism...
...Isn't the pretended greatness of history just a mirage...
...But he was deposited barefoot on a wellscrubbed floor and the sulfurous yellow which had burnt all around him now gleamed from the fur of a rusty-yellow cat...
...In short, equality before the law was what, for her, was at stake...
...This reform of the internal governance structure of corporations would put the constituencies of the corporation—stockholders, workers, consumers—on the board of directors, and so companies would exercise their power in more democratic ways...
...In 1979, Gruh's novel won the Egon Hostovskyr prize for the best piece of Czech fiction published abroad...
...117 lends itself easily to mythology...
...They oversee an organization that has grown very large and highly bureaucratic, again because of its successful alliances with conservative elites...
...In the same interview he says: Today, in a period of utter permissiveness, erotic literature has become a bore...
...Though they have had to maintain silence in order to preserve their lives, their story is not lost...
...In his short essay on Hermann Broch and his Sleepwalkers, published in the Paris weekly Le Nouvel Observateur (April 9, 1982), Kundera—a superb essayist and critic—affirms his indebtedness to a distinct Central European tradition: It seems to me [he writes] that four great novels, two of them written in Prague and two in Vienna, have anticipated and determined the orientation of the novel after Proust: Kafka's The Castle, Hagek's The Good Soldier Schweik, Broch's trilogy The Sleepwalkers, and Musil's Man Without Qualities...
...It is no coincidence that his tale of the corruption of a lyrical creature in the Stalinist world of Czechoslovakia borrows its title, Life Is Elsewhere, from the graffiti that appeared in Paris in May 1968 on the walls of the Sorbonne...
...At war's end, still a child, he foresees quite clearly the nature of the Soviet presence in Czechoslovakia...
...257 pp...
...The Joke contains not only all of Kundera's themes and paradoxes...
...and Grua acknowledges this...
...THERE IS NOT ALWAYS a clear line between recognizing that factors are only comprehended within theoretical frameworks, and becoming lost in imagination when attempting to grasp realities...
...As the process of polarization in Chile began, the bishops consistently acted as a force for moderation and restraint...
...How are we to account in general terms for the differing degrees of radicalization that the various national Churches have experienced...
...But when faced with this fait accompli, they adjusted with surprising and admirable ease...
...Joyce's undertaking was definitely closer to him: to mobilize in a novel the totality of proceedings and styles...
...Objectionable in all such proposals is their undemocratic nature...
...New York: Continuum...
...The book gives us a particularly vivid picture of the intellectual and emotional engagement between Arendt and Blucher...
...The ability of the client regimes to legitimate their power rests on a convoluted scaffolding of half-truths and historical lacunae...
...The novel itself consists of the protagonist's somewhat idiosyncratic responses to a series of routine questions...
...The inevitable reevaluation is now under way in the Democratic party, and these books are part of that discussion...
...This is undoubtedly Kundera's credo: Broch did not understand polyhistoricism as a directive to embrace the social totality, as did Zola or Balzac...
...But he is delivered from the fire by the cat-woman...
...This nearsightedness manifested itself periodically in her practical political judgments as well as throughout her theoretical 118 writings...
...I suspect that Lowell's proximity to centers of research such as Harvard and MIT has a lot to do with it...
...A wasp hovers over Jan's cherry cake, but is distracted by the smell of fresh blood dripping from the wire-bound hands of a collaborator: The wasp, even though already gorged on our cherry cake, clamped her fuzzy mandibles...
...He describes the main characteristics of his aesthetics as follows: All that remained unaccomplished in Broch's work made me understand how necessary it is to achieve: (1) a new art of "novelistic counterpoint" (capable of integrating music, philosophy, narrative and dream...
...Its "philosophy" as well: man, caught in the trap of a joke, suffers a personal catastrophe which, seen from without, is ludicrous...
...But if a character is condemned to triviality in his private life, can he escape to the stage of history...
...he will continue to write in Czech, "for the translators...
...Tsongas, while not naive about Soviet power, realizes that the attempt to achieve nuclear superiority is absurd...
...119 The novel is a dream that condenses many themes—the possibility of preserving moral integrity under oppression, the nature of truth and its necessary connection with history, the relationship of man to his God—all these and others are intricately woven together by the dreamwork...
...His next volume of poetry was sharply attacked for its "pessimism and existentialism...
...Yet it is probably mistaken to imagine a stark conflict between ideas and interests...
...Although interrogation and imprisonment have not been abandoned by the regime, in a country where the state is the sole employer it is often more convenient simply to starve the offender into submission...
...All these proposals would have the effect of redistributing wealth upward...
...its validity is clearly restricted to the political realm...
...His father was one of the leading Czech pianists, famous for his interpretation of Jangek...
...as the signatories of Charta 77 have discovered, the harshest punishments are reserved for those who would disrupt the rickety support...
...their gaiety is, so to speak, a reflection of a bygone gaiety...
...The kind of man Kundera deals with is no different from those living elsewhere...
...The other focuses on the Church's need to defend its interests against governmental encroachment or eroding public support...
...182 pp...
...Jan Chrysostom has applied for a job 15 times...
...In the struggles ahead he will be a valuable ally...
...Yet this anomaly was soon put right...
...Yet Green is an articulate critic of both Reaganomics and the conservative drift in liberalism...
...The logic in Anatole France's (somewhat belabored) quip that in (capitalist) democracy a millionaire and a beggar have equal rights to sleep under bridges appears to have held little force for her...
...Tsongas is also aware that buying "more and bigger of the same" weapons may help our defense industries but will not increase our security...
...The period of time when gaiety and the comical were just one lasted only a short moment in European history, the moment of Rabelais, now lost forever...
...Following this step, Tsongas's further economic program is no surprise: The solution is to increase the financial attractiveness of investment...
...These were good as well as uneasy times...
...125...
...In one sense, this worked...
...That the Catholic Church in Latin America has undergone a political reorientation in recent years is widely known...
...Not only does this approach imply a blatant attack on organized labor, but by diminishing the public sector it also promises further to impair the already deteriorating condition of our nation's cities...
...The sexual scenes, too, pull their weight in this novel...
...In that speech he tried to define the crisis of liberalism...
...Thucydides' Pericles also asserted that future ages would wonder at his Athens, and Hannah Arendt never stopped doing so...
...He regards Keynesian demand management and supply-side economics as inadequate for the 1980s...
...Her style of thought has occasionally been characterized as "poetic" and this too bears the mark of Heidegger who, in "The Thinker as Poet," tells us in verse that "Singing and thinking are the stems/ neighbor to poetry...
...The bishops' commitment to decentralization has inadvertently set off several groups on the ultra right as well, such as the notorious Tradition, Family, and Property associations now common in several countries...
...Arendt was fixated on a mere part of the whole and lost sight of the dependence of that part on the larger historical whole...
...And not only its plot...
...The relations between imagination, history, and political analysis, between understanding and explanation, can hardly be pursued within the context of this review, but we ought to recall that poetry To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...
...PAUL TSONGAS, senator from Massachusetts, delivered the keynote address at the June 1980 ADA convention (included as an appendix in this book...
...GRUgA'S NOVEL is not without problems...
...The Venezuelan Church has also shown greater willingness to consider cooperation with Marxists, if only because of its greater need for allies in a society whose secular leaders abandoned it long ago...
...THE MOST INTRIGUING and difficult questions arise when we begin to ask of each historical account, Why did it happen...
...But here he loses control of his intentions, as do the antiheroes of his novels...
...The Chilean bishops, fearful of Marxism, had no desire to see Salvador Allende come to power...
...Government money does not by itself create a sustainable dynamic...
...For instance, she states in passing that in 1952 and 1953 "hundreds of so-called infiltrees, displaced people trying to return to their homeland, had been killed or captured by the Israelis," conveniently ignoring the rising—and mostly civilian—Israeli death toll that was the result of such "infiltrations" (to be exact: 137 casualties in 1951, 142 in 1952, and 180 in 1953...
...For example, she admired Nelson Rockefeller's political program in 1960 because she deemed it "without ideological nonsense such as capitalism versus socialism and vice versa," not recognizing that Rockefeller's program lacked such "nonsense" because it took capitalism for granted...
...AN EMIGRE WRITER is not an anomaly in our century (and since Ovid and Dante he probably never was...
...Equality before the law, as essential as it is to democracy, no more eliminates discrimination than it creates equal opportunities for all in a class society...
...563 pp...
...ARENDT'S ANTIPATHY to bourgeois mores also informed her view of the United States...
...Finished 15 years ago, The Joke—still considered by many Kundera's masterpiece—is the uncontested forerunner of other great Central European novels—works by the Pole Konwicki, the Hungarian Konrad, the Czechs Hrabal, Skvorec14, Vaculik, and others, whom Americans have since learned to read and admire...
...Green's enthusiasm for his program, however, at times limits the insights he gives us into the issues he discusses...
...In the already mentioned foreword to the new American edition of The Joke, he says: The plot of The Joke is itself a joke...
...The device of locating the beginnings of Jan's consciousness in the foetal stage will, no doubt, be familiar to readers of contemporary European literature...
...But after the Cuban team was beaten by the Dominican Republic last week, newspapers demand "urgent analysis" of the national baseball program and called the defeat a "national catastrophe...
...Preferring to intercede on behalf of particular individuals, they used their close relations with government officials to benefit their immediate constituents as best they could...
...They inadvertently became the antiheroes of a "joke" that cost them their party membership and suspension from the university...
...During this period he produced a pioneering book of literary criticism devoted to the great prewar Czech avant-garde prose stylist Vladislav Vagura...
...That was what I dreamed...
...Referring to one of his masters, Hermann Broch, and Broch's concept of an epistemological or "polyhistorical" novel, he fully subscribes to the idea that the novel is above all an act of knowing, as well as the acknowledgment that "man can boast about his reason, his pragmatism, his cynicism, but he is trapped in the mechanism of the irrational...
...q Mitchell Cohen The Life and Thought of Hannah Arendt HANNAH ARENDT: FOR LOVE OF THE WORLD, by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl...
...Stung by its defeat in 1980, disgraced by its attempt to out-budget-cut the Republicans in 1981, the Democratic party is united in 1982 mainly in its opposition to Reagan...
...Liberation, Paris, December 6, 1981.] There is yet another source of Kundera's sad humor, another playground on which he practices his playful games, courageously mixing great poetry with utter triviality...
...In an essay accompanying the adaptation in book form, Kundera explained how—already blacklisted in Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion112 he was asked to adapt, under an assumed name, Dostoyevsky's The Idiot...
...However, her misses were great as well...
...While some of the attacks on Arendt bordered on the hysterical, particularly in regard to Eichmann in Jerusalem, Young-Bruehl's generalization is simply outrageous...
...In the pre-Socratic world of the polis she found the embodiment of the public realm...
...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...The abolition of discriminatory laws was, of course, prerequisite to a successful struggle against racism...
...The only difference is some people try to hide it and others don't bother" (The Cowards, 1970...
...Or, as Kafka put it in a more concrete way: What are the possibilities of man in a bureaucratized world, in which private life does no longer exist and the land surveyor is watched even when making love...
...q Mark Levinson Paths for the Democrats THE ONCE AND FUTURE DEMOCRATS, by Paul Simon...
...But even if Tsongas's program (a variant of the much talked-about "enterprise zones") was successful in Lowell it is surely no solution to the national urban crisis...
...His approach can only lead to an economic war between the states in which urban centers bid for industries and jobs by offering business subsidies, a unionfree environment, lower wages, a docile labor force, and fewer regulations...
...Not fitting, in fact, fitted her...
...The filter of East Central European experience provided his irony with an original dimension, which he sometimes describes as the result of the unheard-of condensation of history compressed into the lifetime of one generation in one single place...
...Arendt believed her own thought to be a thinking against the entire tradition of Western political philosophy, a tradition that, in her view, ended with Karl Marx...
...grasped Olin by the neck, lifting him high in the air and carried him over the burning field...
...PERHAPS THE MOST ominous problem, to which both authors point with trepidation, is the possible tension between the Church's effort to democratize itself and its desire to democratize society...
...Prague became a hectic center of intellectual activity, resuming the role it had played in the 1930s as a meeting place of art and artists from all over the world...
...we say that he has no business at all...
...In fact, the contours of political reorientation within the Latin American Church are by no means uniformly toward the left...
...He had brought with him his third novel, entirely written in Czechoslovakia, The Farewell Party (Knopf, Pen111 guin), which was soon to earn him renewed international acclaim...
...Gogol and Chekhov were great humorists, but how melancholy...
...Olin sees in this dream Jan's vocation as an artist and the danger that attends it: Keep painting my boy...
...Or Broch: What are the possibilities of man caught in the course of history, descending inexorably, step by step, on a staircase of decline...
...A couple of months later the Prague Spring started—postponing this "normalization" by another year or two...
...In The Origins of Totalitarianism she virtually ignored Russian development from czarism through Leninism and argued that among the causes of the emergence of totalitarianism was the breakdown of the nation-state in the late 19th century, a thesis hardly sustainable, and least of all as regards Germany...
...However, he eschews shrill accusations and remonstrances, if not a certain quantum of guilt...
...But a softlyspoken, "No, I will not," can also constitute an act of dissent...
...We need to plan for success, not simply to rescue semifailures...
...Donald Levine's useful account of the Venezuelan and Colombian stories, summarized above, indicates that the tendency of bishops to assist their benighted flock does not spring in any obvious way from a taste for radical theology...
...Mills closed down, people were unemployed, investments in the community ended, and the city settled in for decades of decline...
...But surely if economic democracy were to work, it would require some sort of democratic national planning...
...Le Nouvel Observateur, April 9, 1982.] KUNDERA'S STORIES are tales of paradoxes, sometimes trivial (triviality, even a certain vulgarity, being so often the dimension of paradox in daily life), always unexpected, abruptly revealing not only a hidden truth but also the emptiness of rituals, hiding the void of human or historical manipulation...
...He might have found another appropriate title a couple of months later in Chicago...
...Those are the times that give me the feeling history enjoys a good laugh...
...And what role do the rest of us have...
...But this kind of discussion is not to be found in this book...
...it reveals a wide perspective through which the best of Central European literature has contributed to a new understanding of contemporary history—or, we might say, of history itself...
...The resource guide alone makes the book valuable...
...productivity is declining because we save and invest too little...
...This is how Kundera, in his seminal novel, sees the story of an important part of his generation, not only in Czechoslovakia but the world over, thus dealing with one of the important paradoxes of our century...
...Each book covers a wide range of issues, and all three agree on one point: a Democratic party resurgence will require a program that can result in renewed growth and productivity in the economy...
...The Questionnaire, newly published in English translation, was originally circulated in samizdat manuscript, earning Gruk eight months in prison and subsequent banishment to the West...
...The Church encountered little organized pressure to compromise with the forces of liberalism, to say nothing of socialism...
...Still, to the extent that we are challenged and angered in reading Arendt's work, we are forced to reconsider and reassert the centrality of qualitative questions in all political research...
...has had one of the smallest public sectors, one of the most inequitable income distributions, the least planning, and recently one of the worst economic performances...
...Gruia closes his tale by quoting St...
...In the novel, Gruga takes an ordinary job application (ordinary, that is, in Soviet-bloc countries) as the impetus for one man's extraordinary journey of self-discovery...
...Collaborators are rounded up by the townsfolk, tortured, hung from the tree of the Republic, doused with gasoline and set alight...
...But the day is marred by violence...
...The problem with this is evident: racism becomes, for Arendt, a formal political question, whereas its reality was conditioned by its interpenetration with the political and the social realms, each playing off the other...
...This was the first encounter with the dominant fact of economic life in the 1970s and '80s: stagflation—simultaneous high rates of unemployment and high prices, violating the liberal theory of fine tuning...
...Sterne and Diderot turn to Rabelais already with a kind of nostalgia...
...saving and investment have declined because inflation and taxes have reduced the incentive to invest...
...Chrononaut and seer, he is the memory-bearer for whole generations...
...Kundera, who had since been awarded the Medici Award for the best foreign book of the year (Life Is Elsewhere), came to France with his wife Vera, for a time still believing that he would go back to Czechoslovakia, perhaps in two or three years, while teaching at the University of Rennes...
...Three years ago, after having his archives smuggled out of Czechoslovakia, Kundera published his Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Knopf, Penguin) and also an account of the cultural genocide pursued in Czechoslovakia after 1968...
...they had to be dragged into it kicking and screaming...
...The rhomboid symbol for female genitals is as immediately recognizable and meaningful to Czechs as Killroy to a generation of Americans...
...New York: Vintage Books...
...Mark J. Osiel Church Politics in Latin America THE CHURCH AND POLITICS IN CHILE: CHALLENGES TO MODERN CATHOLICISM, by Brian Smith...
...his older cousin Ludvik, a poet and translator of Brecht, was one of the leading members of the Brno surrealist group...
...The tiny veins on the folded wings pulsed and throbbed joyously rather than watchfully...
...In any given dispute involving Arendt, we know in advance what Young-Bruehl's evaluation will be...
...The plight of the protagonist, Jan Chrysostom, is not unusual among Czech dissidents—he is unemployable...
...Why did the Latin American Church, as a whole, undergo such a profound and perplexing transformation in its conception of its mission in the world...
...They consequently display some intellectual affinity with the left, at least in the categories with which they discuss their nation's problems...
...His tragedy lies in the fact that the joke has deprived him of the right to tragedy...
...Lowell, along with many other New England cities, was an example of the problems of the free enterprise system...
...Imagination lets us "see" things in perspective, although, as she insisted elsewhere, this was not to be equated with "fictional ability...
...Linking thinking and poetry has, of course, its own problems...
...Let us hope that Gruga's prayer for his country and for the nations will be answered...
...In 1969 Kundera and I met again in Paris, spent long hours together, discussing the future...
...The great novelists of Central Europe ask: What are the possibilities of man in a world that has become a trap...
...These new groups, no less than those of the Catholic left, have arrogated to themselves the right to speak in the name of the Church...
...The Czechs have not always been equal, in heroism or in seriousness, to the destiny that has been relentlessly thrust upon them (for that matter, who has...
...According to the daily Trabajdores,"The team has decayed, lacks inspiration, and suffers from uncertain leadership...
...But his wager was still a different one and could probably be expressed as follows: neither poetry, nor philosophy, nor human sciences...
...The reader, in falling victim to Gruga's art, must forgive him anything...
...MILAN KUNDERA was born 54 years ago in the Moravian capital Brno, the city of Mendel, Musil, and Jana6ek...
...That there would be tension between democratic decision-making at the local level and the requirements of the national economy is undeniable...
...280 pp...
...In my novels love-making is the condensation of all the internal conflicts of a character and his story...
...economy was characterized by high rates of growth with relatively (by today's standards) low unemployment...
...Let us try a second account...
...But rather than preventing such a conflagration, the junta proceeded to initiate one...
...More telling, however, was what followed: "So you ask me where I am...
...Not that it is all bad...
...In others they appear to have tolerated numerous deportations of their clergy...
...The Chilean Church thus extricated itself from alliances with antiliberal landowners, enabling it to sponsor serious efforts at socioeconomic reform through its influence on the Christian Democratic party...
...Gruga demonstrates extraordinary skill in articulating the strange and beautiful language of the hidden...
...Its institutional frailty made it less inclined to set foot on any new theological limbs, and its lesser educated bishops have been more conventional on questions of economic inequality...
...In a meditation on HOlderlin's line that "poetically man dwells . ." Heidegger ruefully remarks that "Our dwelling is harassed by the housing shortage...
...This concentrated interaction between the private and the historical is, in my view, responsible for the enormous explosive power released by Kundera's merciless paradoxes...
...Tsongas takes this conservative notion and tries to make it the basis of a new liberalism, one relevant to the "realities of the 1980s...
...The peril is that in its attempt to transform itself, the Church will simultaneously invite its own balkanization into an array of divergent factions, all the more easily conquered by an authoritarian state...
...Penguin then published a partly restored version in England...
...Cloth, $30...
...Paper, $8.95...
...The Church, after all, will rise to the defense of its interests much like any other large-scale organization...
...Perhaps naively, they believed—with many others—that military intervention, presumably of short duration, would be the only way to restore order and prevent civil war on a Spanish scale...
...Each time his application has been rejected without explanation...
...The result is a journey into his own past and the past of his nation, a journey in which we participate via his responses, witty, whimsical and ironic, to questionnaire No...
...The ease with which the juices flowed promised that the hands would continue to be quiet and harmless...
...And indeed, if we look beyond his immediate Central European masters, we can see that Kundera is a true descendant of a literary tradition of divertissement romanesque—that of Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, and others, in which divertissement expresses important reflections about human life...
...The risks of the Church's radical gambit in Latin America are thus as spectacular as its promise...
...The separation of Church from state was achieved earlier and with much less acrimony in Chile than in Venezuela or, particularly, in Colombia...
...Augustine's pledge to speak, not in sophisticated confabulations but simply, in accordance with God's Law...
...Jan's coming-of-age is documented complete with casual cruelty, irreverent hubris and sweaty armpits...
...Princeton University Press...
...As a student at the University of Prague, Kundera and his friend Jan Trefulka (another important writer from Brno, today silenced in his homeland), were ardent followers of the socialist dream and members of the Communist party...
...The fight against antimiscegenation laws, in her view, should have been the locus of the civil rights struggle, not the integration of educational facilities...
...This picture of the Church—until recently allied with the oligarchy against the poor, now converted to violent revolution—could scarcely be further from the truth...
...PAUL SIMON'S The Once and Future Democrats is the least helpful...
...But beneath this tenuous unity there is ideological unease and organizational disarray...
...Everybody...
...Thus the highly praised, promising young poet learned his lesson early in life...
...The most readable part of Tsongas's book is the chapter on the Third World, perhaps because the formative experience of his life occurred in an Ethiopian village where he spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer...
...Only there are we all equals"— while simultaneously asserting that government ought to guarantee that segregation was not legally enforced...
...Olin, as a Czech soldier in the French Foreign Legion in 1939, is warned in a vision of the approaching war and assured of his own survival...
...Jan's suspicions are confirmed later when he relates one of his dreams to Olin, his uncle and dream interpreter...
...Publication of the Czech text, by an emigre publishing house in 1978, earned him wide acclaim as a brilliant and serious writer...
...The newly democratized Church, encouraging participation at the base and collegiality among the ranks, presents to the citizens of a repressive society the compelling image of their prospective future...
...This bit of stubborn absurdity in dealing with an absurd situation is far more than a literary device to justify the recounting of Jan's personal history...
...The dead man is surprised at their blindness and determines to remain dead until they take notice...
...In 16 chapters Simon states his views on such issues as health, education, jobs, agriculture, cities, presidential selection...
...A year later the new French president, Mitterrand, made him a citizen of France...
...Throughout, Green marshals statistics and argu124 ments...
...But comparison with other industrialized countries indicates that we don't have to accept the argument...
...Gruga, like Plutarch, understands that to love is to forgive, and to forgive, in any but a trivial sense, is not to blind oneself to the failings of men but to accept them for what they are—ignoble, perhaps, but also a part of our human endowment...
...The tragedy of Antigone fills us with feelings of human greatness...
...Put briefly: America's economy is deteriorating because of declining productivity...
...The ultimate framework of her thought remained the crises of German thought in the half-century before the rise of the Third Reich...
...Yet the Colombian bishops, because of their material success, have attained higher levels of education than their Venezuelan counterparts...
...Colombia remained more rural and agricultural than Chile or Venezuela...
...she combined a radical democrat's belief in spontaneity and political participation (particularly as embodied in the post-World War I Workers' Councils) with a conservative's insistence that the political realm was—or at least ought to be— something separate from the social...
...The great Central European novel has enthroned history...
...It is precisely those bishops farthest from the intellectual centers, occupying dioceses in the most isolated and economically marginal areas, who have felt impelled by the force of circumstances to experiment with new forms of helping the poor...
...New Haven: Yale University Press...
...When it was issued here many years ago, an American publisher reprinted the abridged and edited British version, which evoked an angry public protest from Kundera...
...furthermore, publicsector deficits soak up private-sector investment capital that could otherwise be used productively...
...It was Scholem who characterized the tone of Arendt's book as "heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious...
...342 pp...
...THE ROAD FROM HERE, by Paul Tsongas...
...This book is an extension of that effort, Tsongas's attempt to "put my thesis into a coherent framework...
...The Church consequently retained a degree of hegemony over cultural life, which to this day is nearly without peer in Latin America...
...He will probably never return to his own country to live...
...This "reality" has taken my home city out of its doldrums and has caused me to regard corporate America with a different perspective...
...Fishing is a hitandmiss endeavor...
...For roughly 25 years after World War II the U.S...
...To bear witness is to observe or witness events, but also to speak out and, more, to speak the truth, to recount what one has witnessed...
...Liberalism was put on the defensive—incapable of controlling the economy and unable to respond effectively to charges of inefficient government bureaucracy...
...Jan Chrysostom does both...
...3.95...
...This is precisely the inference we are encouraged to draw from Brian Smith's helpful history of the 115 Chilean Church...
...and we have always been hard pressed to sympathize with the need to provide business with greater advantages...
...Jan's attempt to make sense out of those mysterious rejections is aided by a happy accident...
...Each time he has been asked to fill out a questionnaire about his class origins, education, political activities, and so on...
...If we accept private control of the investment process and assume that only private wealth is productive, then the argument is sound...
...There is very little in this book that is new...
...Kundera, like Thomas Mann, seems to be one of these...
...welfare state was one of the stingiest in the world (even before Reagan...
...The book's major flaw, however, lies in its author's apparent inability to establish much critical distance from her subject...
...Compared to most industrial economies, the U.S...
...This probably accounts for Kundera's high opinion of the novel as a genre, which he has defended for years against all those prophesying its decay...
...Nor is it clear at what point in an increasing tide of government repression the "interests of the Church" begin to be significantly affected...
...One can overlook factual errors (such as dating Israel's birth on the 18th rather than on the 14th of May 1948...
...It should be obvious, at least, that if repression is severe and intense enough, it will intimidate (if not eradicate) even the most aggrieved of clerical critics...
...more secure...
...As a philosopher Kundera was never tempted by satire or science fiction...
...Yet this does not make planning impossible or undesirable...
...The only source of new logs for the fire to achieve this dynamism is the private sector...
...Like a dream, this novel is promising, puzzling, seductive and, like a dream, it contains an ineffable component, an aspect that resists all analysis and interpretation, a mood that will haunt the reader and bring him back to the work more than once...
...New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...Boston Globe, August 26, 1982 ing as a rich man's endeavor...
...Gogol once said, if you look with attention and long enough at a funny story, it will turn sadder and sadder...
...The wasp feeding on the blood of the nation, on the blood spilled by the nation itself, is sensed rather than seen by the young Jan Chrysostom, at home with his cherry cake, out of sight of the violence...
...Tsongas is from Lowell, Massachusetts, once the textile capital of the world...
...For the fulcrum on which Gruga's entire endeavor pivots is Jan's initial decision to cross out nothing...
...Yet that is what must happen...
...into the wound, right up to the opening of its mouth and all its hairs and feelers were helping to work the proboscis deeper and deeper...
...She was a Jewish woman who was compelled to flee her native Germany and then France, a temporary haven, for the United States...
...it is not just a loving biography, it is an adoring one...
...These innovative inclinations in parish practice find no stimulus in theory, for the bishops are less informed about or sympathetic to liberation theology than their Colombian neighbors...
...such a board should be probing where the U.S...
...114 The experience of the Colombian Church was quite different...
...He sees a smiling, naked woman walking through a wheat field, her hair ignited by the sun's heat, the stalks around her blazing, about to consume him...
...Thus, a couple of months after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the book was already in the hands of its French readers and on its way to world fame...
...In some countries the bishops have seized the initiative as soon as their priests or nuns have ben arrested...
...Yet, even though Tsongas can write with compassion about the Third World, he still at times lapses into an incredible naivete: Since most Third World nations know how to bargain effectively by now, the era of exploitation that has concerned many observers is pretty much over...
...There is a third approach that focuses not on the macroeconomics of the national economy but on the microeconomics of companies, markets, and workers...
...Asked to define herself politically in 1972, she denied the validity of such an attempt and noted, somewhat bemused, that the left thought her to the right, the right thought her to 116 the left or some sort of maverick, and that she herself "couldn't care less...
...She was at home with Pericles' Funeral Oration: "[T]his is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business...
...and it is often in the hidden that truth is to be found...
...It contains a wealth of information about Arendt, recreates the various milieus of her life, introduces her ideas, and dwells at length on her "tribe" of remarkable friends and acquaintances...
...However, and this is probably what is really important, Kundera does not subvert the Communist world and its politics...
...For Arendt, on the contrary, freedom had a strictly political connotation...
...THUS KUNDERA AND HISTORY (or politics, if you wish) are close acquaintances...
...At the very outset of his journey, Jan suspects that his dreams define him more faithfully than his curriculum vitae...
...Though the dream landscape may initially look more familiar to a Czech reader, the novel is certainly accessible to Americans who have a basic knowledge of European history and culture...
...Economic democracy, Green further suggests, also includes democratic control of the investment process...
...unlike Simon and Tsongas he rejects the assumption that there is a trade-off between economic growth and equality...
...The agency and its chief executive office should be so constructed as to minimize political pressure...
...The mourning with which the Helena story ends is of a different weave from the mourning that becomes Electra...
...It is clearly some idea of what the Chuch is, and of what its worldly objectives should be, that informs the bishops' notions of what its earthly interests are...
...Kundera's most recent success was his adaptation (he called it variations) of Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste, running for a year to critical acclaim and full houses at the Paris Theatre des Mathurins...
...She argued in On Revolution that the American Revolution succeeded, while the Russian and French failed, because only the Founding Fathers of the United States made sure that the political realm retained its autonomy...
...Olin hung on like a kitten in its mother's mouth, those teeth could have killed him but they did not bite, they were safe...
...Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press...
...Add the talent, the genius if you wish—and you are probably close to an understanding of one of the most fascinating and most paradoxical phenomena of contemporary literature...
...The issue of the 1980s," Green states, "is economics...
...Allusions as recondite as this, however, are rare...
...Furthermore, if we are to take the German philosophical influences on her seriously—and we must—then it is necessary to conclude that she was doing more than casting a line into the turbulent waters of her times...
...it was not a question of freedom from want but freedom to enter the public realm, to engage in great deeds, and to speak great words among one's peers...
...Olin shook his legs, one of his boots came loose and fell into the fire...
...Jan, like the Chartists, confounds the regime's attempt to have it both ways, to rewrite history behind closed doors and then hold up the product in public as the "objective" basis for their power...
...In spite of this, I still find the sexual act fantastic and extremely revealing...
...The fundamental contradiction of the country," she wrote not long after her arrival, "is political freedom coupled with social slavery...
...The success with which the Church in different countries dealt with liberalism in the 19th century teaches us a great deal about its effort to come to terms with socialism in the 20th...
...He wants to show the cen.trality of new interpretations of Christian faith— interpretations that deny the distinction between sacred and profane—as the true source of the Church's recent political engagement with the world...
...Heidegger's impact on Arendt's mode of thinking is also evident in her Aristotelian construction and differentiation of meanings in The Human Condition, a book that avowed to "think what we are doing...
...We are told that the destruction of Lowell is caused by "the problems of free enterprise," and then that what once destroyed Lowell ("the good old profit motive") will now save it...
...Both Tsongas and Simon accept the belief that there is an inevitable trade-off between economic growth and equality...
...It is the hidden, the ineffable, that imparts to this novel its haunting mood...
...his applications have been rejected because he has taken the liberty of crossing out irrelevant questions...
...Young-Bruehl firmly demonstrates the depth of Arendt's ongoing commitment to her Jewishness and to Israel, despite her many criticisms of Israeli policy and the Jewish "establishment...
...But until now there have been almost no detailed studies of how and why this happened...
...equality not only has its origin in the body politic...
...And only the most gnostic or mystical conception of humanity's relation to God is prepared to ignore the common interests of the faithful as an organized community...
...In Jifi Gruk's case, such a refusal provides the foundation for an eloquent and morally profound statement about freedom and political oppression...
...Using the often unique material and experience that communism (specifically in Eastern Europe) contributed to the 20th century, he manages to subvert all sorts of false certainties, philosophical and moral clichés, and self-serving lies that seem to appeal to people all over the world...
...This, however, never reached the United States, where, in the meantime, Kundera has deservedly been recognized as one of the finest writers of our time...
...Legally guaranteed civil rights, however, do not abolish racism...
...They sided with the conservative oligarchy that emerged victorious from the civil wars of the 19th century and continued to profit from their close ties to this unified social elite...
...Hannah Arendt was once approached by her student Elisabeth Young-Bruehl with a translation Young-Bruehl had done of a phrase by Aristotle...
...RELIGION AND POLITICS IN LATIN AMERICA: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN VENEZUELA AND COLOMBIA, by Daniel Levine...
...Jan Chrysostom is many things, chrononaut, seer, artist, dissident, but also itchy adolescent engaged in a sleazy double affair with a village girl and her widowed mother...
...The good old profit motive works as nothing else can or ever will...
...The novel is an opportunity for a supreme intellectual synthesis...
...Thus, in reviewing past job-hunting efforts, he muses: I should have mentioned the dream with the circle, about the way it turns and about the faceless women and the women whose faces are made of layers of pink petals which I keep peeling off to get at the likeness underneath but the layers are without end and the petals circle as they spiral to the ground...
...MARK GREEN'S Winning Back America is an attempt to offer a program for an "electable liberalism for the next generation...
...In a 1953 Partisan Review article on "Understanding and Politics," she referred to the Biblical story of King Solomon's prayer for an "understanding heart"—something she, in turn, defined as imagination, quoting Wordsworth to the effect that it is "but another name for . . . clearest insight, amplitude of mind,/ And Reason in her most exalted mood...
...the business cycle, if not abolished, would be tamed, and the new economics would provide for growth and prosperity...
...The structure of the economy was to be left intact, but it would be finetuned by Keynesian demand management...
...Clementis disappeared from the pictures in history books, but the hat stayed...
...For us, however, the result is also a profound insight into the possibility of preserving moral integrity under oppression...
...The principles of liberalism after World War II were those of the New Deal...
...For almost two years of military rule, the bishops did not recognize that the violation of civil rights had become an integral feature of the new political order...
...In the meantime, Kundera and I, together with the writers Pavel Kohout, Ivan Klima, and Ludvik Vaculik, were involved in another, this time less pleasant incident: we all spoke openly at the Congress of Czech Writers in June of 1967...
...The current malaise of the Democratic party can be traced back to that period, over 10 years ago...
...By the late 1960s, traditional liberalism, the political force behind the welfare state, had lost its cohesion...
...She seems to have been almost constitutionally incapable of seeing the necessary interweaving of the social and the political...
...The author of Capital committed the ultimate sin of placing the social question (that is, class) at center stage...
...A remarkable statement...
...Her obsession with antiquity betrayed the influence of German romanticism and of Heidegger who, we learn from Young-Bruehl, was briefly Arendt's lover and for whom she was inspiration while he was writing Sein and Zeit...
...Though Jan's act is not a dramatic one (he does not shout out a denunciation of the regime), still it is daring...
...At the same time the uneasy regime of Antonin Novotny, haunted by the collapse of the economy and the unexorcised ghosts of Stalinism (and those of its victims), continuously fixed on artists and intellectuals as scapegoats...
...Even so, it was not until three and a half years after the coup that the bishops first publicly suggested that the junta was not the legitimate representative of the people...
...He proposes, for instance, a national public jobs program for those 122 who cannot find work in the private sector, and he is an articulate critic of the Pentagon, arguing that increased military spending does not necessarily make the U.S...
...That city's cycle of rise and decline has had a major impact on his thinking: In the twentieth century the textile companies went south—to be closer to the raw material, cotton, and to take advantage of low wage scales...
...And it ends in a final paradox: at the bottom of the comical it has discovered despair...
...The liberal-labor coalition was splitting over the war in Vietnam at the same time that Richard Nixon, acting according to liberal economic theory, was fighting the war-induced inflation by provoking a recession...
...It is indeed an impressive study of a most engaging, if problematic, political mind...
...Green, for many years an associate of Ralph Nader, is an economic democrat...
...One looks in vain for any acknowledgment that satisfying social needs and making money are two distinctly different and often antagonistic things...
...As much as Sartre, but not exactly in the same way, he thinks highly of literature and, as we have seen, of the novel as a most important key to the world...
...So when Jan Chrysostom's father, in the midst of conceiving him, takes the name of the Lord in vain, Grua has Jan comment: ". . the Lord probably pardoned him, for after all what was He to do with Edvin, after He had endowed him most generously with the gifts of beauty, tenderness and an appetite for this very thing...
...Its hairy legs, too, were braced in flesh...
...But because the Church in Venezuela has not been successful in building a solid organization in the local parishes, it has been compelled to be more flexible in responding to its poorer constituents...
...But the existence of that film (released here by Grove Press) remained a secret to the public at large...
...The vernacular of the astrologist, ever present, creates metaphors that have been corrupted for the American reader by the recent trendy revival of that art...
...It is a revealing comparison, because the underlying ideas of the two are very similar...
...The dream is of a corpse, surrounded by mourners who 120...
...In Chile they have chosen to act publicly only when they themselves or their political allies have been attacked...
...The experience, the social climate and model they all refer to is for him mainly a source of poetic imagination...
...For much of this we owe thanks to Philip Roth and the series he edits for Penguin, "Writers of the Other Europe...
...But whatever he 113 brought from there—experience, poetic vision, style, philosophical perspective, ironic tradition, and all his innumerable stories—is large enough to allow the whole world into it...
...Jan, too, has the power of vision...
...It is indeed an important issue, and its implications need to be understood if one is to take economic democracy seriously...
...Arendt embraced a "passionate thinking" and was strongly biased against exaggerated claims on behalf of a "science" of politics...
...In addition, many American corporations are becoming sensitive to the need for their representatives to be skilled in the language and customs of the country in question...
...For instance, referring to the storms provoked by Eichmann in Jerusalem and "Reflections on Little Rock," Young-Bruehl states, In both cases Arendt sailed upwind of strong currents, deep emotions, and unmastered pasts...
...If we grant a crucial premise (and most liberals do), then Tsongas's argument seems reasonable...
...In 1967 Moynihan stated, "We [liberals] have paid too little heed to the limited capacities of government to bring about social change...
...After all, the great political freedom Arendt found in the polis was predicated on slavery...
...For example, "Ma Fille," the name of the cat that delivers Olin 121 from the burning field, is a play on the Czech word "Mafie," the designation given to the resistance movement in World War I. ("Mafia," not in the sense of a covert criminal organization, but of a self-help or patriotic one...
...ELISABETH YOUNG-BRUEHCS BIOGRAPHY of Hannah Arendt is a valuable and illuminating intellectual and personal portrait...
...The bishops did not so agreeably resign themselves to the modern world...
...The complement of democracy in the workplace, Green argues, is democracy in the boardroom...
...Protest against oppressive regimes can take a dramatic form: demonstrations, work stoppages, hunger strikes, even self-immolation...
...You will read The Joke, across all the semantic barriers, as a novel of your own fate, and look with impatience and curiosity toward the new book, to be published in Paris next year...
...Henceforth, Jan decides, he will cross out nothing, not even those questions that inquire about events of which he could have no personal knowledge...
...The West has been staring at the comical for so long that the gay comedy of a Rabelais transformed itself into the comedy of despair of a Ionesco...
...As planned, unemployment increased, but prices did not come down...
...And so, for instance, the book lacks a discussion of planning...
...But this laudable concern with ecclesiastical decentralization is full of unresolved ambiguities...
...But for whatever it has done to him, Kundera does not hold history in high regard...
...They successfully avoided confrontation with the regime until the last few months, when Allende briefly proposed an increase in state control over the educational system...
...This is especially apparent if we consider the differing reactions of bishops in various national churches to the challenge from the left...
...WINNING BACK AMERICA, by Mark Green...
...Jan takes this admonition as both a personal directive and a clue to his past failures...
...Immediately, he was deprived of his Czechoslovak citizenship...
...pretend not to notice that in place of a sexual organ a tree is growing out of the deceased, a blooming apple tree full of bees...
...The French poet Aragon took me to the head of one of the biggest publishing houses, Claude Gallimard, who believed what I told him and had the novel translated...
...Liberals intent upon the resurgence of older urban centers will have to lure industries that have left (or are thinking of leaving) for more profitable environs...
...A business-government partnership that is not subject to public control ("minimize political pressure") is going to plan the long-run direction of the U.S...
...It will be interesting to know what the fate of Milan Kundera's first novel, The Joke, will be in the United States, now that it has at last been published in English in its full, nonmutilated version...
...Two sorts of explanation are being proposed in these studies...
...We learn more about American politics by noting the attention Tsongas's book has received than from reading the book itself...
...These drawbacks should not, however, overshadow the value of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's book...
...Dismantling that optimistic vision and contradicting it through a vibrant poetic demonstration is, in its consequences, inevitably a political act, an act of subversion...
...The 1970s witnessed a reaction against the welfare state...
...Her work and life, now the subject of a lengthy biographical study by YoungBruehl, defy easy characterization...
...It is impossible to say how much of Lowell's 123 economic revitalization (based on high-technology firms setting up operations there) is the result of Tsongas's program...
...Cuba is the world's reigning amateur baseball champion, and fans have become accustomed to victory every time there is an international tournament...
...It is fundamentally an act of courage, a profoundly moral act...
...Later he taught literature and writing courses at the Czechoslovak Film Academy, then one of the world's best film schools...
...The debate (or lack of it) in the Democratic party is interesting for many reasons, not least for the light it throws on the need for a long overdue discussion on the nature of liberalism...
...But these are small flaws...
...But if the Chilean Church most easily handled the encounter with liberalism, the Chileans also have faced the most painful experience with socialism...
...But, unlike Sartre, Kundera's immediate masters, Broch, Hagek, Kafka, and Musil, all were poets...
...These developments made for a more secular society in which the Church retreated to a less significant role than it occupied in either Chile or Colombia...
...In her sense of the homelessness and atomization of modern men and women, we can hear not only the reverberations of the Nazi triumph, but also the echoes of those German intellectuals, especially in academe, who saw their world undermined by advancing capitalist civilization and hence counterposed qualitative Gemeinschaft with its Kultur to Gesellschaft, with its quantification and fragmentation of life...
...Of course, other theorists have employed history in questionable ways even while making lasting contributions...
...The concept of the Church's interests is therefore a rather vague one and cannot offer much aid in explaining why and when the bishops decide that they have had enough...
...So the dichotomy is a false one...
...The argument is familiar and gets to the heart of the liberal dilemma...
...She in fact came to politics (from philosophy) because she was a Jew in Germany, and her Rahel Varnhagen, written in the 1930s, contains much self-reckoning...
...She was a thinker who translated the German philosophical traditions in which she was tutored—by none less than Heidegger, Husserl, and Jaspers—into a series of political studies and arguments that generate endless controversy...
...The official philosophy of the system that is the playground of Kundera's philosophical-literary game is one of historical optimism in which history has a meaning and man is the conscious creator of his own history (or, at least, has the potential to be that...
...In reading Arendt, we frequently find ourselves hovering between brilliant flashes and lyrical but unsatisfactory uses of history, particularly ancient history...
...KUNDERA EMERGES TODAY-frOM his short stories, plays, and four novels—at the peak of his creativity, as the most pertinent ironist of the human fate in the latter part of our century...
...Here the civil wars of the 19th century were won by the liberals, who stripped the Church of the privileges it retained in Colombia...
...the bias of other comments cannot be ignored...
...At the core of Tsongas's new liberalism is another version of trickle-down economics...
...A true poet, however, can make these experiences, this strange mixture of history, privacy, and ritual, eventually meet...
...a snoutful of fangs...
...Kundera believes that— as much as history—sexuality used to be no laughing matter, a sphere to which the comical had no access...
...Applying this experience—discoveries made in 110 the realm of the novel—to the world of Stalinism and its consequences is in itself not a political act but a literary one...
...But in The Joke I attempted to ask the following provocative question: And what if history was just a joke in which we have been imprisoned...
...Together with his friend Milos Forman (whose American films are also not shown in Czechoslovakia, although he is a welcome visitor there), Kundera was singled out as an example of the regime's tolerant policies toward famous artists who decided to work and live abroad...
...One can scarcely resist the irony that it is Brian Smith, the former Jesuit priest, who slights doctrinal innovation in favor of the nuts and bolts of bureaucratic self-interest, while it is Levine, the Jewish social scientist, who revels in the mental universe of the new Catholic theology...
...In this respect he is different from Orwell, Zinoviev, and Koestler...
...We both knew that these were just two wrong answers to an impossible question...
...He too recognizes, like his countryman Skvorec14, that ". . inside, people are dirty dogs...
...It is to Gruga's credit, however, that his naturalism is never gratuitous...
...Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Bliicher (her second husband and intellectual comrade) saw The Origins of Totalitarianism as what Young-Bruehl calls a "frontal assault" on Europe's 19th century (its -"bourgeois" century), which spawned what was later crystallized into German totalitarianism...
...I am really not in the mainstream of present or any other political thought...
...The comedy of a Bald Soprano unveils life without any hope and greatness...
...History was always reserved for drama and tragedy...
...This was followed soon after by Kundera's breakthrough in prose, the short stories Laughable Loves (Knopf, Penguin) and, in 1966, The Joke, his first novel...
...She was thought unsympathetic, even callous, in the two works which burst most impatiently out of her personal sympathy for innocent victims caught up in a whirl of events they were powerless to resist...
...Simon's economic program includes the creation of an agency similar to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which, through its loan-making powers, could help to make decisions on which industries need special encouragement and could help plan for a transition for industries that will be eliminated by some new domestic or foreign development...
...The federal funds arrived: Model Cities, aid to education, revenue sharing and so on, and the decline continued...
...Arendt's 1959 "Reflections on Little Rock" exemplifies the critical flaw in her thinking and also shows what she had in common with elements of classical liberal thought...
...The European adventure of the comical is nearing its end, like the European adventure itself...
...For, in simply telling his story as it happened, Jan defies the regime's unspoken demand to render history consistent with present policy...
...And our own century's humor is not even melancholic any more: it touches on despair...
...This rather petrified administrative apparatus has proved unresponsive to efforts at creating new grass-roots programs of collective self-help among the poor, although for decades such programs elsewhere have become the most promising development in Latin American society, in the judgment of some observers...
...354 pp...
...All these years, however, an excellent film version of The Joke was available, shot in Czechoslovakia during the Czech Spring of 1968...
...The Paris daily Liberation commented: "Receiving Milan Kundera, France has acquired one of the greatest living writers...
...Take, for example, in the Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Vlado Clementis, on the cold day of the Communist victory, covering with his own hat the head of the Communist leader Klement Gottwald, who would later have him hanged...
...IN THIS NOVEL, Gruga establishes himself as an expert intuitive psychologist, gifted in his understanding of both character and dreamwork...
...The Czech cultural world became the center of a struggle for a change in the nation's overall way of existence, and Kundera was one of its main spokesmen...
...Having escaped the Nazi sweep, she fell in love with the foundations of the American Republic, all the while (as Young-Bruehl notes) retaining the German language as her homeland...
...Secure in its power, the episcopate has remained very reluctant to consider any form of cooperation with Marxists, according to Daniel Levine's interviews...
...What they have lived and survived, he sees and remembers...
...Perhaps as an outgrowth of all this, tensions and contradictions abound in her mature political writings...
...as punishment, we were fired from our jobs and expelled from the party...
...15.95...
...He maps out a program consisting of 27 sections, each addressing a different issue...
...Government would play an increasingly important role in the economy...
...And I cannot read even Henry Miller any more...
...The Venezuelan Church presents yet another pattern, distinct from the preceding two...
...Young-Bruehl tells us that Arendt came to call her own method Perlenfischerei (pearl fishing), a characterization that must be judged only partly accurate and highly problematic...
...For Democrats, this can be hard to accept since we have traditionally viewed investWould Democracy Help, Maybe...
...In almost every case he supports positions far superior to those of Ronald Reagan or even the center of the Democratic party...
...393 pp...
...He is condemned to triviality...
...Up to a point, the two projects run naturally together...
...Yet only those survive emigration who left with baggage that is large enough to accommodate the whole world, and who do not attempt to throw everything away (including childhood and style) in the vain hope that they will be able to grasp the world anew...
...In Jan's decision, Gruga offers an answer to a perennial human problem that has haunted Czechs since the battle of the White Mountain: how can an oppressed people preserve moral integrity while still ensuring biological survival...
...Green advocates economic democracy in the workplace, citing studies showing that when workers feel they are working for themselves, absenteeism declines, productivity improves, and fewer days are lost to strikes...
...Cloth, $27.50...
...Agree or not, one can't help but learn something from this book...
...Green's program includes increased worker ownership, the strengthening of the National Consumer Cooperative Bank that offers credit to consumer cooperatives, and bringing union pension funds under the control of their beneficiaries...
...2) a new art of radical austerity (making it possible to embrace the vertiginous complexity of the modern world without the loss of architectural clarity...
...For once, however, the skeptical, pessimistic Kundera was more optimistic, more a victim of his own "cheating" than I who was known to my friends for my incurable optimism and faith in the meaning of action...
...Another reality became apparent...
...ought to be 20 years from now...
...The disagreement between these authors is an important one, and not entirely explained by variations in their respective national cases...
...He was going back to his native Brno, I was staying abroad...
...The journal on which most of us had worked was closed down, and its publishing house was taken away from the Czechoslovak Writers' Union...
...Translated by Peter Kussi...
...12.95...
...What if man, as small as he is in his private affairs, were no greater while he makes revolutions and wars...
...Kundera always protested (and does so again in his foreword to the new American edition of The Joke) against simplistic political interpretations of his writings...
...He failed desperately, feeling almost sick, and had to rush for cure to Diderot, as to a source of healing waters...
...The intimate and insidious bond between the local priest and the seigneurial patron was not disrupted by the growth of any substantial urban economy...
...This liberalization of the Church made it much more likely, in turn, for the Chilean left to avoid the virulent anticlericalism that plagued the histories of Colombia and Mexico...
...Briefly, she argued against the political enforcement of social equality...
...How does labor fit into this scheme...
...And how do community groups...
...The oil boom induced an economic expansion that spawned a large urban working class, which became the basis of support for mass political parties...
...But not because I want to be so original—it so happens that I somehow don't fit...
...If you ever acted the way you paint, you'd turn into quite a bastard...
...When the coup occurred, the episcopate offered neither support nor condemnation...
...He settled accounts with his own "lyrical past" in a rather devastating manner in Life Is Elsewhere (Knopf...
...Writing philosophically and as a poet about his country's and his generation's experience, Kundera creates one of the century's true philosophical works in prose, recognized as such by readers whose historical experience in this century has been quite different...
...q Zuzana Kohakovâ An Uncommon Prayer THE QUESTIONNAIRE, OR PRAYER FOR A TOWN AND A FRIEND, by RI Grula...
...It would seem plausible, at first glance, to expect that those Churches which have been subjected to growing repression would tend, increasingly, to speak out against the injustices done to them and to others...
...But Young-Bruehl is far from home ground when she deals with these questions, especially the Middle East...
...They criticized in equal measure the violence of the extreme right and the unauthorized factory seizures of the far left...
...Gruga is no less skillful at drawing character than at articulating dreams...
...It is surely because of the present flatness of the American political terrain that we notice this book at all...
...On a trip to France, in the spring of 1966, I carried the manuscript of Kundera's as-yet-unpublished (and, many thought, unpublishable) novel, The Joke...
...This is at once the most phenomenological and intellectual of novels...
...economy according to a profit calculus...
...Yes...
...If its bloody vaudeville was as meaningless as the vaudeville of our private lives...
...The dangers of lyrical attitudes and their paradoxes became one of the leitmotifs of Kundera's work...
...In this striking statement we find what is central to and most troublesome about her thinking, specifically her vision of the political realm as a Ding an sich counterposed to the realities of "society" and hence class...
...Arendt was aware of this and perhaps even thrived on it...
...It would even attack him occasionally, but it was also eager not to make him a permanent exile...
...Each section is followed by a relevant list of organizations, newsletters, books, and articles...
...This ought to be a joint business-government agency to attract to its board some of the most incisive minds in both of these fields...
...I am nowhere...
...he has only experienced—like Kundera himself—something that elsewhere was spread over several generations...
...Yet even then, liberalism was only partly successful...
...This was intended to "normalize" intellectual life in Czechoslovakia...
...They continued to praise the junta for its professed commitment to Christian values...
...There is not one serious sentence in Jacques le Fataliste, Kundera observes, but he immediately explains the difference between Diderot's time and ours: There are things that never come back...
...Paper, $9.95...
...A serious crisis is preoccupying Cubans and attracting widespread attention in the Cuban press...
...New York: Bantam Books...
...Milan Kundera Habent sua fata libelli—"books have their own fates...
...The first conclusion that emerges from these two works is the inaccuracy of the impression, often conveyed by the popular press, that there has been a sudden and thoroughgoing reversal in the political perspective of the Church...
...This means extra work and some puzzles for the American reader...
...Since World War II the U.S...
...If we accept this analysis, the solution seems obvious—lower corporate taxes, cut capital gains taxes, liberalize depreciation—anything that, in Tsongas's words, "increases the financial attractiveness of investment...
...It has engaged in a wider range of local programs than the Colombians, despite its scarcer resources and intellectual lethargy...
...There is no close, positive relation between the degree of repression to which a national Church is subject and its propensity to assume an aggressive stance in fostering sociopolitical change...
...But the crucial question—and this is where differences arise—is, how...
...World War I started a process (by no means finished) that was fatal to Europe, to its culture, and its survival...
...to the extent that Arendt's pen yielded flashes of insights, pearls were indeed harvested...
...Ludvik and all the others end up in the trap of the joke history has played on them: lured on by the voice of utopia, they have squeezed their way through the gates of paradise only to find, when the doors slam shut behind them, that they are in hell...
...This finding, however, does not sit very easily with Levine's own preferred explanation...
...This education has exposed them to a wider range of intellectual currents, including those of "liberation theology...
...But a problem arises as soon as we begin to compare his case with the others...
...Grub is not interested in legend-making, but in a larger kind of truth...
...It reads as if it were put together in a hurry—resembling an anthology of positions rather than an analysis of issues—but this is perhaps inevitable when a politician (Simon is a congressman from Illinois) writes a book...
...Tsongas tells us that Pat Moynihan thought his ADA address was the best given to that organization since Moynihan's own in 1967...
...While the achievements of the welfare state did ease the lives of millions, poverty was still widespread...
...Within the larger dream that is the novel itself, dreams, visions, and portents abound...
...Government money has but one purpose: to foster an environment that will attract private money, giving disadvantaged sectors of society a chance to reap the reward provided by economic growth...
...3) an art of the specifically novelistic essay (one that does not pretend to deliver an apodictic message, remaining hypothetical, playful, or ironic...
...The fighting is over, his mother has sewn a Czech flag and baked a cherry cake for the first time since the war began...
...History emerged for them as a monster, inexplicable and without mercy, impervious to human will...
...After due consideration of its Latin and German renderings, Arendt remarked, "Ja, well, my dear, it's not exactly right, but maybe Aristotle would think it more interesting than wrong...
...The "normalized" Czech regime, persecuting every original artist, every nonconformist art, would not publish Kundera's books...
...They represent the range of opinion in the party—Simon the traditional liberal, Tsongas the neoliberal, and Green the left...
...All over the country, people are wondering how the Cuban baseball team failed to win the Gold Medal at the recent Central American/ Caribbean Games in Havana...
...And in this way, even though liberalism is the mass movement of humanitarian reform, it is continually frustrated by its reliance on private control over the investment process...
Vol. 30 • January 1983 • No. 1
