The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

June 3, 2008 at 10:44 am (Reading)

I recently finished reading this book on a long car-ride back from Green Bay, Wisconsin. And with that sentence leading this off, I’d like to say this is not my typical review writing but a general commentary on the novel.

The book bears a good deal of similarity to The Unbearable Lightness of Being. There’s an established premise within the first couple of pages that addresses something equally political and human that will be investigated throughout the book, there is a series of shorter stories involving different characters that comprise the whole, there are authorial intrusions that not only act as general commentary but they directly address the construction of the writing and the characters treating them as fictive entities, it’s good, and there’s a guy who has extra-marital affairs that his wife knows about and is somehow expected to accept by the guy. But do not be led astray by this long list of similarities! This is a different book, and it addresses different issues, as well as some similar ones, as Kundera’s other works. My edition was translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim and was printed in 1994 by HarperPerennial (I found it in a used bookstore actually.), and I recommend the edition–not that I can read Czech, but the style seemed similar to other Kundera books, so I imagine it was well-maintained or there’s some big conspiracy between all the translators of Milan Kundera’s work.

The book is divided into 7 sections: Lost Letters, Mother, The Angels, Lost Letters, Litost, The Angels, The Border. Kundera, in one of his authorial intrusions where he directly addresses the writing of the novel, describes the sections as variations on each other, which, although he has done writing that played in the same way before, adds an interesting twist on the breaking up of narrative throughout. The war of the political versus the cultural is played out during the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia (and the many other occupations of the country are occasionally brought into play as well). The fear and probability of how a culture’s identity can be erased by political propaganda and control are expressed within the first section, and brought into the narrative with the first line of section 2: “It is 1971, and Mirek says that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” (3). The book does not limit itself to this topic, but it revisits it frequently and plays out a few variations, as Kundera has dubbed the sections.

Overall this was a fantastic read, and I recommend it highly. The book readily breaches into discussing its own intellectual prerogatives, but as always Kundera invites the reader to share in his theories. It addresses contemporary matters and maintains a firm grip on analyzing the evolution of the modern world, while not getting bogged down in its own language.
It’s just over $11 at Amazon.com. Click here to buy it/look at it from their site.