Every year at about this time I focus my reading on a single country and read around twenty books from that country. This year the winner is.the CzechRepublic/Czechia, though some of the books were published when the country was still part of Czechoslovakia.
I do not intend to give a potted history of Czech literature. You will find a few links on my.Czech page. However, I will make a few comments.
Writers such asHrabal, Ivan Klíma, Milan Kundera and Josef Škvorecký have an international reputation.Škvorecký and his wife founded Sixty-Eight Publishers , an expatriate publishing firm, based in Canada that published various Czech authors during the communist period, including what may be the most famous Czech novel of the era: Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. If you are not too familiar with check literature, you will be well advised to start with the authors mentioned above rather than the ones I am going to read now though, of course, both groups are well worth reading.
While it was difficult to get novels published in the communist era particularly if they were in any way critical of the regime or did not glorify communism, it was even more difficult to make a films. However, my introduction to Czech culture was more through the cinema than its literature and I saw many fascinating films, which tended to be full of humour, quirky,and clearly not promoting the communist ideal. Directors such as Miloš Forman who later had a successful career in the US, Jiří Menzel and Věra Chytilová were just some of the directors who produced fascinating films.
It is interesting, of course, that repression can lead to fascinating works of art being created as clearly happened in Czechoslovakia during the communist era. However, the Czech Republic continues to produce some interesting novels some of which I shall be reading and reviewing over the coming weeks and if you are not familiar with Czech literature, I would urge you to read some of them.