The book of tattling and forgetting

• Milan Kundera, communist snitch.

The Czech magazine Respekt has published an alleged police report from March 14 1950, stating: "Today, at around 1600 hours, a student, Milan Kundera, born 1.4. 1929 in Brno ... presented himself at this department and reported that Iva Militka ... had met ... Miroslav Dvoracek ... who had apparently deserted from military service."

The report said Dvoracek, who had illegally fled the country after the 1948 Soviet coup and was considered a traitor by the communist regime, was to pick up his case from Militka's flat that afternoon. When he went back to the flat, following the tip-off, he was seized by police. He faced the death penalty but was sentenced to 22 years in jail, of which he served 14, most of them in a hard labour camp.

Militka told Hradilek that she had informed her boyfriend and future husband Miroslav Dlask of Dvoracek's whereabouts and that he had passed the information on to his friend Kundera, then a 21-year-old university student.

It takes a lot to make him break his silence - Kundera has given few interviews in the past 25 years. But yesterday the writer well-known for his loathing of hardline communism, vehemently denied the claims, calling the attack "the assassination of an author".

The novelist's curse

• Michael Dirda reviews Milan Kundera's newest book of essays in The Washington Post.

In subsequent pages of "The Curtain," Kundera discusses humor, 19th-century fiction's discovery of the "scene," an author's rights, the main problem of modernity -- "the 'bureaucratization' of social life"-- and how such masters as Broch and Musil used the novel as a vehicle for real thinking about society, politics and human purpose. Throughout, Kundera writes plainly but with passion. He bewails our current "ethic of the archive" -- the conviction that every scribble from a writer's hand is important -- and urges instead an "ethic of the essential." Only the aesthetic project itself truly matters, the fully achieved novel, poem or play. In this light, the desire for artistic fame isn't mere egotism:

"Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produced books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional -- thus non-useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious -- is contemptible. This is the novelist's curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania."

One may disagree with this -- surely, there is a place in our lives for entertainment and escape -- but, as the French expression goes, Kundera always gives you furiously to think.

From the page to the screen

• The Guardian picks the 50 best film adaptations of books.

Another list to nitpick, this time slightly less so. There's a definite British slant to the selections (The Day of the Triffids?), but it's a pretty good collection nonetheless:

1984
Alice in Wonderland
American Psycho
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Brighton Rock
Catch-22
Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
A Clockwork Orange
Close Range (inc Brokeback Mountain)
The Day of the Triffids
Devil in a Blue Dress
Different Seasons (inc The Shawshank Redemption)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner)
Doctor Zhivago
Empire of the Sun
The English Patient
Fight Club
The French Lieutenant's Woman
Get Shorty
The Godfather
Goldfinger
Goodfellas
Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now)
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Jaws
The Jungle Book
A Kestrel for a Knave (aka Kes)
LA Confidential
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Lolita
Lord of the Flies
The Maltese Falcon
Oliver Twist
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Orlando
The Outsiders
Pride and Prejudice
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The Railway Children
Rebecca
The Remains of the Day
Schindler's Ark (aka Schindler's List)
Sin City
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
The Talented Mr Ripley
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
To Kill a Mockingbird
Trainspotting
The Vanishing
Watership Down

It seems that, unlike the WGA's recent "101 Best," they're judging the merits of the screenplay adaptations before the film itself, which is a tricky tightrope to walk; some books flat-out resist a filmed adaptation at every turn, where others are practically tailor-made for the screen. Some others I'd nominate:

Dolores Claiborne, scripted by Tony Gilroy and directed by Taylor Hackford, always gets my nomination for the most underappreciated Stephen King adaptation, second only to Rob Reiner and William Goldman's take on Misery. (I've never been a fan of either the film of The Shawshank Redemption or the original novella; it's King at his more preachy and ickily sentimental.) Dolores Claiborne is a book-length monologue by the title character; Gilroy restructed the story somewhat and despite a jarring, tacked-on courtroom finale, it's consistently gripping. Hackford's stylish take on the flashback sequences is amazing.

Waterland, adapted by Peter Prince from the novel by Graham Swift, is particuarly good, once you get past the Americanized plot elements that are rather obviously grafted on. Like Dolores Claiborne above, the story incorporates many flashback sequences that somehow maintain the heft and magic-realism weight of the novel. [It just so happens that the film is playing tonight -- 4/20 -- on the Independent Film Channel at 9:15pm. Unfortunately, the print IFC is using is panned-and-scanned; Stephen Gyllenhaal's filming of it takes every advantage of the Panavision widescreen process and can only be truly appreciated in that format. Image Entertainment will be releasing the film on DVD next month.]

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, from the novel by Milan Kundera, tends to split people straight down the middle. Most people I know who've read the novel hate the movie, and vice versa. I like them both very much, but they are, by neccessity, very different beasts; the film is fairly linear, whereas the novel is decidedly not so. Philip Kaufman and Jean-Claude Carriere did the adaptation, and Kaufman directed.

The Woman in the Dunes, adapted by Kobo Abe from his novel, and directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara. Abe is an acquired taste, but if your taste happens to run towards unsettling, threateningly erotic surrealism, then he's your man. This is the kind of adaptation you watch and, if you're familiar with both, you think, "It couldn't have been done any other way." It helps, of course, that Abe did the adaptation himself, but Teshigahara deserves a lot of credit for crisply visualizing Abe's strange, almost otherworldly textures and shadings. [Abe and Teshigahara collaborated twice more, on adaptations of Abe's novels The Face of Another (1966) and The Ruined Map (1968), both of which have yet to be released on video in America.]

Deliverance, scripted by James Dickey from his novel, and directed by John Boorman. This is the movie that's essentially responsible for every redneck-psychopath stereotype in every movie made since; apparently, there are many people in the world who truly believe there are toothless, shotgun-toting rapists behind every tree in the American South. Get past that, and you're left with truly one of the best movies ever made, one in which Dickey's poetic examination of masculinity versus nature is preserved with tremendous clarity and resonance.

There are plenty of other great adaptations that didn't make the cut -- The Last Picture Show, Wonder Boys, In the Bedroom, The Manchurian Candidate, The Pledge and especially A Simple Plan are others that come to mind -- but these are some I think are particularly worth singling out.