Kitsch is the enemy of every artist, of course, but it has special menace for the artist who has made his way out of the abyss of "totalitarian kitsch" (as Kundera calls it), only to find himself peering into the chasm of Western anticommunist kitsch. Kundera, who left Czechoslovakia in 1975, after he was expelled from the Communist party for the second time and could no longer publish or teach there, now lives in Paris and works in an increasingly—what to call it?—abstract, surreal, "poetic" idiom.

His need to experiment with form is surely connected to his personal vendetta against the puerilities of "socialist realism" and its "free world" counterparts….

His novels have all the unpredictability and changeability of mountain weather, and are marked by an almost compulsive disregard for the laws of genre. Like a driver who signals right and promptly turns left, Kundera repeatedly betrays...