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From the vantage point of his Paris flat, the Czech writer Milan Kundera still obsessively contemplates Prague, the city he was forced to leave nine years ago when, silenced by the pro-Soviet government, his continued life there finally became impossible. Prague has continued to be the setting for all of Kundera's writing . The Book of Laughter and Forgetting brought him to a wide international readership and was compared favourably with Gogol and Kafka. The New York Times wrote: 'It is impossible in this space to do justice to a masterwork . Kundera makes music out of history.' His new book The Unbearable Lightness of Being has been eagerly awaited and on the occasion of its publication Arena talks to Kundera in Paris and seeks reactions to his work from George Theiner , Karol Kyncl , Ian McEwan and Edward Goldstucker.