SOURCE: Miron, Susan. “Central and East European Fiction Chronicle.” Partisan Review 61 (fall 1994): 643-50.

In the following excerpt from a review of several Central and Eastern European authors' works, Miron lauds Hrabal's portrayal of World War II-era Czechoslovakia in The Little Town Where Time Stood Still and compliments its translation by James Naughton.

In Tolstoy's world, no two unhappy families are alike. The same might be said of modern Eastern European writers, each scarred differently from a similar juncture of historical time and geographic space. Yet most have been determined, despite the banning and censorship of their work, and at risk of imprisonment or exile, to “tell the truth” about their epoch as they knew it. “A heavy biography,” as the exiled Romanian writer Norman Manea puts it, pithily describes many of their lives.

One soon realizes that little of the recent literature which has emerged from behind the...