I enjoyed reading this book, but I’m afraid quite a bit of it was beyond my ken. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is loosely a novel, but in the book and in the interview at the end he also calls it a set of variations, after the musical form. The seven parts are loosely intertwined stories exploring the themes of laughter and forgetting, many centering on characters affected by the Prague Spring and subsequent Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Kundera also occasionally breaks the fourth wall, inserting narrative from the author into the story. I was quite conscious of a lot of deeper meaning zipping past me. On the other hand, Kundera frequently included scenes of the quietly absurd in everyday living that had me cracking up. So this literary novel was fairly successful in engaging me.
As readers may notice, the cover is a bit on the risqué side. I see much more explicit stuff on almost a daily basis, but on a book cover it’s still fairly rare. Most (perhaps all, I’m not going back to check) of the variations include sex scenes, and all of them include romantic relationships (though some are a bit odd). A young poet has a tryst planned with a married girl from the countryside, but when the time comes to consummate, she keeps her legs locked together and instead holds his penis all night long in what I gather to be some sort of death grip. In retrospect, she’s happier for having done this because sex is not so memorable but experiences of holding a cock all night and doing nothing else will come few and far between.
On a more humorous side is an orgy scene in the final variation, with hostess Barbara being extremely intent on everything going according to plan. No pairing off! She inserts herself into someone else’s coitus to maneuver the direction it takes. She better approve or else! Two of the male orgy participants become so amused with Barbara’s antics they eventually burst out laughing, and they are sent home. I can’t help but imagine this as a Monty Python scene.
The twin themes are laughter and forgetting. Laughter is viewed both as a way to denigrate the good from others, to tear it down, as well as angelic laughter which is joy in creation. But Kundera writes that even this is derivative of the other form. Forgetting comes in to play particularly when scenes swirl around the aftermath of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakie in 1968. Multiple times Kundera posits that erasure of a people’s history (e.g., banning writers, firing historians) is the first step to eliminating that people. I’m not quite so cynical as Kundera. I think it takes a lot to erase a people. For example, the Jews spent several thousand years scattered to the winds and yet they maintained an identity if not a unified culture. Who knows if the Czechs and Slovaks would have been as resilient. Luckily a decade after this book the Iron Curtain fell.
There were a few happy uplifting moments, but it seemed to me the overall effect was quite cynical. Insightful, but cynical.
I’m also thinking I should read this book (or rather, books like it) alongside someone else, so we can compare and contrast thoughts. Cause I know a lot of the meaning was just lost on me. In the author interview at the end, interviewer Philip Roth says of the book your prose is a kind of psychoanalysis of politics.
Somehow I missed that. I’m sure it’s there. I just am too clueless for that kind of insight.
Really only one other blogger review of the book came up on Google Blog Search in the first few pages. Lots of people like to quote the book but few reviewed it.
Title: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (original title Kniha smíchu a zapomnění)
Author: Milan Kundera
Translator: Michael Henry Heim
Cover creator: Andrzej Klimowski
Imprint / publisher: King Penguin / Penguin Books UK
Format: Paperback
Length: 237 p. (includes author interview)
Publication date: 1985 (originally 1979)
ISBN-10: 0-14-006416-8
LC classification: PG5039.21.U6 K613 1981
