In December 1968, a plane carrying Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes touched down in Prague. The two authors had come to show solidarity with Czechoslovakia’s writers and to discuss the year’s historic events: how the hopes of Alexander Dubcek’s Prague Spring had ebbed into the interminable autumn of the Soviet patriarch.
Their host was the Czech novelist and essayist Milan Kundera, who has died aged 94. Mindful of the need to talk freely, Kundera took his guests to a sauna, the one place in the city impossible to bug. As the steam rose and their bodies began to overheat, the visitors asked where they might sluice off the sweat. The Czech led them to a back door opening on to a hole in the frozen Vltava. He motioned towards the river and they clambered down, expecting him to follow. But Kundera remained on the bank, laughing as these hothouse flowers of Latin-American literature emerged like popsicles from the icy waters.
