Kundera’s humor had a deeper purpose. I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn’t fear, by the way he smiled. Kundera’s novels often felt essayistic; they were about whatever was on his mind: nostalgia, the absurdity of absolutes, music. Kundera saw sex as an act of redemption and of liberation under repressive regimes, but his obsession came back to haunt him. Geoff Dyer compared Kundera’s novels to the slapstick burlesque of “The Benny Hill Show,” with “the nurse in her bra and panties getting chased around by these horny doctors.”

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Persons: “, ”, Philip Roth, Jonathan Rosen, ’, Kundera, Critics, Geoff Dyer, Kundera’s, Benny Hill Organizations: The New York, Communist Locations: Czechoslovakia, France