Like Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist and critic, Konwicki has gained the attention and support of American writers like Updike and Roth for his mixture of satire, surrealism, humor, and political complexity. Despite some lapses into sentimentality and verbosity, [A Minor Apocalypse] shows Konwicki at his best and provides evidence of his potential for moving from the Italian Mondello Prize to greater achievements. Only his lofty popular status and the inner conflicts of the present regime seem to protect him from reprisals for his open flaunting of the communist bungling of Poland in the 1970's.

A Minor Apocalypse, composed in 1979 after the collapse of Gierek's bourgeois-socialist government, suggests why Solidarity could have risen (and as quickly fallen under the Soviet axe). The story involves a Kafkaesque hero who is told by his fellow dissident authors that he has been chosen to immolate himself that very day during a...