SOURCE: Banville, John. “Laughter in the Dark.” New York Review of Books 38, no. 14 (14 February 1991): 14-6.

In the following excerpt from a review of Too Loud a Solitude, Tadeusz Konwicki's New World Avenue and Vicinity, and Péter Esterházy's Helping Verbs of the Heart, Banville discusses the new position of writers in Eastern Europe and praises Hrabal's novel as an allegory of the process of writing.

Woe betide the writer who finds himself cast as a hero. In the West, where even artists do not take art seriously, we look upon the “dissident” as somehow more authentic than we could ever hope to be, with our word processors and benevolent editors and Guggenheim Foundations. The dissident, of course, is always someone who dissents elsewhere, “over there,” behind the Curtain or the Wall or under Table Mountain. Compared to them, to these brave ones, our rebels seem like noisy...