Saturday, July 26, 2008

"“I have had a very adventurous life, but not because I have an adventurous nature or yearned for a life full of adventure,” he said. “Fate just wanted it this way.” Yet while the West has lionized him, in his native Czech Republic, 19 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he remains a source of ambivalence, if not sometimes downright resentment. “Havel gets attention in the West by saying banal, kitschy things,” said Bohumil Dolezal, a leading right-wing commentator, who once worked for Mr. Klaus."