Prof's Choice

Truth, Being, and Rhinoceroses

Jorge Luis Borges, "Deutsche" Requiem "in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New Direction, 1962)—An imprisoned Nazi awaiting execution describes how he became a Nazi and why he killed Jews.

Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum (translated by Ralph Manheim; Vintage International, 1990)—In Nazi Germany, a dwarf—the antithesis of the Aryan ideal—searches for identity in a Polish town conquered once by Russians and then by Germans.

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (translated by Michael Glenny; Knopf, 1992)—Bulgakov's fantasy captures the moral failings of Communist realities.

Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros and Other Plays (translated by Derek Prouse; Grove Press, 1960)— When a disease turns people into rhinoceroses, the only person not affected is seen as a monster in this play about conformity.

Vaclav Havel, Living in Truth (edited by Jan Vladislav; Faber and Faber, 1989) and Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (translated by Michael Henry Heim; Harper, 1991)—Compatriots Havel and Kundera were once friends, but their relationship was strained by their different choices: Havel stayed in the former Czechoslovakia and worked for change; Kundera fled to France to write. A double reading of Havel's essays and Kundera's novel takes us through different degrees of engagement in the social and political life of their homeland.

Verona