I read the dissident Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting in 1981 while sitting in my office for my part-time job at UCLA. Upon finishing, like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, I felt:
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.
I couldn’t figure out how to call up Kundera in Paris, but I did notice that the book’s translator, Michael Henry Heim, was a professor at UCLA with an office a block from mine. So I called him up instead, but he wasn’t in.
I did get to meet Heim later and he was a great guy.
