The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

MILAN KUNDERA
1979

INTRODUCTION

In 1978, while exiled in France, the Czechoslovakian writer Milan Kundera wrote a novel destined to become an international success. Forbidden to be published in his homeland, Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was written in Czech but first published in French as Le livre du rire et de l'oublie in 1979. It was subsequently translated into English and published in the United States in 1980.

Although the book is generally classified as a novel, it does not have the traditional structure of beginning, middle, and end. Rather, the seven parts of the book have individual characters and different plot lines. Yet The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is more than a collection of connected short stories. Indeed, the separate sections do not even correspond to the traditional notions regarding short stories. Rather, they are snippets of a story interspersed with historical commentary interspersed with philosophical meditation interspersed with autobiographical detail. What holds the entire work together is the compellingly controlled voice of the narrator, a voice that remains consistent throughout the text. This voice, Kundera himself (or a character playing the part of "Milan Kundera"), gradually reveals to the reader the themes and variations that comprise the novel.

The historical context of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is important for any reader approaching the text. From an exile's perspective, Kundera writes of his nation's descent from a

republic to a Communist dictatorship, its brief resurgence as an open society during the Prague Spring of 1968, and the country's return to a totalitarian police state, after Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in August 1968, reestablishing Czechoslovakia as a Communist Eastern-bloc nation.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting explores the ways that governments and people both create and extinguish memories, how laughter can be both angelic and demonic, and what is required to remain human in the face of crushingly dehumanizing circumstances.

A recent edition of the novel, translated from French by Aaron Asher, was published by Perennial Classics in 1996.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). His parents were Ludvik and Milada Kunderová. His father was a well-known musician who studied with the famous Czech composer, Leos Janácek. Indeed, his father's musical influence can be seen in many of Kundera's later works.

In 1948, Kundera completed secondary school and enrolled in Charles University in Prague. He began his studies in literature, later changing his emphasis to film and directing. He joined the Communist Party in 1948 as an idealistic youth; he quickly became disillusioned, however, as the Party quickly established a police state. An outspoken critic of the Party, he was expelled in 1950. Kundera joined the faculty of the Film Academy in 1952.

Kundera published his first collection of poems in 1953, while working as a translator and playwright. By 1956, Kundera was readmitted to the Communist Party. By this time, he had become a well-known literary celebrity in Czechoslovakia. In 1960, he wrote Umení romáu: Cesta Vladislava Vancury za velkou epikou (The Art of the Novel: Vladislav Vancura's Journey tothe Great Epic, 1960) The book was a work of Marxist criticism, a type of criticism that considers class, economics, and the flow of power in a culture; it was well received by Czechoslovakian critics and scholars, although Kundera later renounced the work. In 1988, however, he wrote a different book under the same title.

Kundera began writing his first novel, Zert, in 1962, although it was not published in Czechoslovakia until 1967 due to censorship. The book is a satire of totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia, and was first published in English as The Joke in 1969.

In 1968, for a brief period, restrictions on writers and artists lifted slightly in what became known as the "Prague Spring." The Soviet Union, however, was fearful that the freedom enjoyed by the Czech people could spill over into a revolution throughout the nearby Communist bloc countries. In August, 1968, Soviet tanks entered Prague, and a new repressive government was installed by the Soviets; this government ruled Czechoslovakia for twenty-one years. As a leader of the Prague Spring movement, Kundera found himself blacklisted: he could not publish any writing in Czechoslovakia and he lost his job at the university.

In 1975, Kundera received permission from the government to move to France. There he began The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, his most important work to date. Written first in Czech, the novel was then translated into French as Le livre du rire et de l'oublie and was published in 1979. Soon thereafter, the book was translated into English and was published in 1980. In 1996, Kundera, working with translator Aaron Asher, issued a new English edition of the novel.

Since the publication of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera has written many well-known novels, plays, short stories, and essays, including The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) and, more recently, Ignorance (2000). Kundera has been honored with a host of international prizes for his fiction, and critics consider him to be one of the finest writers of the twentieth century.

An intensely private person, Kundera lives in Paris with his wife, Vera Hrabankova.

PLOT SUMMARY

Part One: Lost Letters

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is comprised of seven sections. Although the stories in each section resonate with the other stories, the book does not have an overarching plot. Rather, each section functions as a variation on a theme, in much the same way the various parts of a musical symphony interact. In addition, Kundera frequently interrupts the story he is telling in each section with autobiographical remarks, essays on Czechoslovakian history, philosophical musings, or additional stories. Consequently, the plot does not function as it might in a more traditional novel.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting opens with an important anecdote about Communist leader Klement Gottwald. The leader is standing on a balcony in Prague with his comrade Vladimir Clementis at an important public gathering. Because it is cold and windy, and because Gottwald has no hat, Clementis puts his own fur hat on Gottwald's head. The moment is captured in photographs displayed throughout the country. However, four years later, Clementis is hanged for treason, and carefully airbrushed out of the picture. All that remains of him in Czech memory is his hat. The fur hat as a metaphor of public memory resonates throughout the rest of the text. While Gottwald and Clementis were historical figures, it is likely that the anecdote about the hat is fictional.

The story then turns to Mirek, a man who meticulously writes down everything that he and his friends discuss in a diary, in spite of the fact that his papers might be confiscated. He decides he will put his journals in a safe place, but first, he wants to retrieve old love letters from Zdena, a woman he had an affair with twenty-five years earlier. The only reason he wants the letters, Kundera surmises, is that she is ugly, and he does not want it to be known that he had an affair with an ugly woman. He notices as he drives to Zdena's that two men are following him. Zdena refuses to give him the letters and he realizes after he leaves her apartment that it is now too late to remove the incriminating documents from his own house. Mirek is convinced that Zdena has betrayed him to the police; however, she has not done so, and Kundera reveals that she loves Mirek. By the time he returns home, the police are already there. He is sentenced to six years in prison, his son is sentenced to two years, and ten of his friends are sentenced for one to six years, depending on the severity of their transgressions. The significance of the section title becomes apparent: although the letters still exist, they are lost to Mirek. In addition, Mirek has overestimated the importance of the letters held by Zdena and underestimated the incriminating nature of the letters left at his house.

Part Two: Mama

In this part, readers meet Marketa, her husband Karel, his mother Mama, and their friend Eva. Marketa has never liked her mother-in-law, but as the story takes place, her feelings soften somewhat. Karel and Marketa invite Mama to stay with them for a week. Mama, however, has confused the day she is supposed to return to her home. This is unfortunate because Eva, a woman with whom the couple has sexual relations, arrives before Mama has left. In a comic scene, Mama comes into the sitting room to say goodnight to the three young people, just as Eva comes in scantily clad, and Marketa approaches the room with nothing on but a necklace. Marketa hastily retreats before Mama notices her.

Later, readers learn that Marketa has been one of Karel's mistresses, and that the two of them arrange for her to meet Eva. Eva never realizes that her new best friend has been intimate with her husband before the three of them begin their mutual affair.

Many things happen at once in this story: Karel and Marketa's marriage seems troubled, Marketa falls in love with Eva, and Karel comes to an understanding of his mother and has warmer feelings toward her. Love, it seems, heals several of the characters.

Part Three: The Angels

Part Three opens with the story of two American girls, Gabrielle and Michelle, who are studying in Europe under the tutelage of Madame Raphael. They are reading a play by Eugene Ionesco, The Rhinoceros, and they do not really understand it. The narrator (presumably Kundera) interrupts this story to interject a meditation on the subject of laughter, then to tell the story of how he wrote an astrology column under an assumed name after he lost his job in 1968. He next turns to a discussion of two kinds of laughter: that of the angels and that of the devil. The angels' laughter, he asserts, is secondary to the devil's, and is an imitation. The devil's laugh is in response to the meaninglessness of the world, while the angels' laugh rejoices in the orderliness of the world. Kundera then returns to the story of the young Americans, who completely miss the subversive nature of the play they are studying. Next he returns to the story of the young woman who gave him the job writing horoscopes and who lost her own job as a consequence. He closes the section by revealing that he knows he must not live among the people he loves any longer, and he decides to leave his homeland.

Part Four: Lost Letters

Kundera introduces readers to Tamina in Part Four. She is a thirty-two-year-old Czech exile, living somewhere in Western Europe, and working as a waitress. She came to this unspecified location with her husband several years earlier, but he has since died. She struggles to retain her memories of their life together. As time goes on, she becomes obsessed with recovering a set of notebooks and letters that she gave to her mother-in-law for safe keeping when she and her husband fled Czechoslovakia. In these notebooks, she recorded the details of her life. Now, in order to keep her memories from fading, she feels she needs to retrieve the notebooks and letters. However, it is not safe for her to return to Czechoslovakia. Various people promise her that they will retrieve the notebooks for her, but in turn, each withdraws their offer. Tamina is so desperate that she even sleeps with a man who promises to get them for her. Finally, her brother agrees to retrieve them. When he arrives at Tamina's mother-in-law's home, he discovers that the package has been opened and the notebooks have been read (but it is not clear who has read them). At the same time, Hugo, the man Tamina has been sleeping with, decides he cannot go to Czechoslovakia because he has published an article that he believes will cause him problems with Czech authorities. These revelations disturb Tamina greatly, and she feels a terrible revulsion for Hugo. Even worse, she realizes that her affair with Hugo has erased all memory of the sexual relations she once shared with her beloved husband.

That Kundera titles two sections of his book "Lost Letters" reveals the importance he places on written records. Through these sections, he explores the consequences of lost letters as a substitute for lost memories.

Part Five: Litost

Part Five is a meditation on a word that Kundera claims only has meaning in Czechoslovakian. The closest he can come to a definition is "a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery." This misery is nearly always followed by a desire for revenge, to make another person feel as miserable as the person experiencing litost. In a story that illustrates the concept, a young student invites a butcher's wife named Kristyna (who is from a small town he has visited) to meet with him in Prague. The young student expects to sleep with her. However, he is given a last-minute invitation to a gathering of famous poets on the same evening his guest is supposed to arrive. He tells her of his dilemma, and she urges him to go, so long as he will bring her an autographed copy of a book of poems. He agrees.

Kundera gives each of the famous Czech poets names of other literary figures from the past such as Voltaire, Petrarch, and Boccacio (these are the names of actual writers, none of whom are Czech). He uses the occasion of their gathering to parody all such gatherings and to parody self-important writers.

The student returns home after the drunken evening, and attempts to have sex with Kristyna. She refuses, saying that it will kill her to have sex. He believes that her love for him is so great that she cannot bear the thought of living without him if they have sex. In the morning, however, he discovers that her fear of pregnancy caused her to refuse; giving birth, not her love for the student, would kill her. The emotion the student then feels, Kundera explains, is litost.

Part Six: The Angels

Kundera opens this section (which has the same title as Part Three) with a retelling of the story of Klement Gottwald and Clementis, this time inserting the detail that Franz Kafka attended school in the building where the two men stood on the balcony. In Kafka's novel, The Trial, Kundera writes, "Prague is a city without memory." This opening passage is crucial for the entire book: Kundera again addresses how the public state has erased private memory by reiterating the Gottwald Clementis story. He is suggesting that Kafka, writing many years before the Communist takeover, predicted that in the modern age, Prague would be a city where people could simply disappear, the memory of their existence obliterated by the state.

Next, Kundera turns to the story of his father's last years. A famous musicologist, the elder Kundera suffers from aphasia during the last ten years of his life, and the condition causes him to gradually lose all memory of words. Kundera uses this as the backdrop for the tale he begins to tell, returning once more to Tamina's story.

Tamina is deeply saddened by the loss of her husband, and is unhappy with her life. One day, a young man comes into the restaurant where she works and offers to take her away, to a place where she can forget that she has forgotten much of her life with her husband. She agrees to go with the man. What follows is a long dreamlike sequence in which Tamina is taken by boat to an island inhabited by children who have no memories. She is the only adult there, and must learn to play their games. The children begin to fondle her, and finally they rape her. The sexual games they play out while using her cause friction among the children, who begin to quarrel and become hostile. When Tamina is finally able to put a stop to the sexual abuse, the children mistreat her in other ways. Although Tamina has now forgotten Prague and her husband, she is terribly unhappy. Trying to escape the island, she dives into the water and begins to swim. She swims all night, only to find in the morning that the children have rowed a boat out to meet her and are watching her. She struggles, then slips beneath the water and drowns.

Part Seven: The Border

The final section of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting tells the story of a man named Jan and his sexual encounters at orgies or with a variety of women, most notably Edwige, who is also his friend. One of Jan's friends, Passer, is dying of cancer. In the midst of this, Jan attends an orgy at a house owned by a woman named Barbara. Throughout, he finds himself preoccupied with the idea of the border. Jan spends a good deal of time thinking about the various kinds of borders that exist in the world, of the lines that separate one thing from another. On the one hand, the border is what separates men and women. By the end of the chapter however, it is also the border that separates the living and the dead. When Passer dies, all the characters gather for his funeral. Papa Clevis, an older man who is usually very self-possessed and serious, loses his hat. The man who is to give the funeral oration does not notice, however. All the mourners can think about is the hat, and how it has toppled into the grave on top of the coffin. Although people struggle to control themselves, they are overcome with laughter.

In the last scene of the chapter, Jan goes with Edwige to a nude beach. The scene serves to demonstrate how two people, lovers for many years, are not able to fully communicate with each other. Edwige comments on how beautiful all the nude bodies are; Jan, however, is reminded of the nakedness of the Jews as they were herded into extermination chambers during the Holocaust. Kundera writes, "They never understood each other, Edwige and he, yet they always agreed. Each interpreted the other's words in his or her own way, and there was wonderful harmony between them. Wonderful solidarity based on lack of understanding." The final image is of a group of naked people standing together; a man lectures them while "their bare genitals stared stupidly and sadly at the yellow sand."

CHARACTERS

Boccacio

Boccacio is the name Kundera gives to a famous Czech poet who appears in Part Five. In reality, Boccacio is the name of a famous medieval Italian poet who wrote popular, funny stories. Kundera uses this name to characterize the Czech writer's literature.

The Children

The Children on the island are nameless and largely featureless. They exist as a group, and as a group, they brutalize Tamina. Kundera uses them to represent the mass mentality of the Communist state. Indeed, the scenes on the island are reminiscent of the camps to which children in Communist countries were sent to be indoctrinated.

Edwige

Edwige is a young woman having an affair with Jan in Part Seven. She functions as an illustration of companionship based on misunderstanding, ignorance, or meaninglessness.

Eva

Eva appears in Part Two. Eva is a young woman who has had an affair with a married man, Karel. Karel arranges for Eva to meet his wife, Marketa. The women become very close friends and decide to have sex with Karel at the same time. Eva ultimately asks Marketa to visit her house, presumably for sex with her and with her husband, but Eva actually intends to sleep with Marketa alone.

Gabrielle

Gabrielle is a young American girl studying in Europe with her friend Michelle. She appears in Part Three, and she serves as an illustration of ignorance and also as a means to segue into a discussion of angelic and demonic laughter.

Hugo

Hugo is a young writer who is infatuated with Tamina. He has sour breath, and is very unappealing to Tamina, although he thinks highly of himself. After Tamina goes to bed with him on the understanding that he will retrieve her lost notebooks for her by going to Prague, he breaks his word, saying that it would be too dangerous for him to do so.

Jan

Jan is the protagonist of the final section of the book. He is a forty-five year old man who is suffering from a perceived meaninglessness in his life. He has had many affairs, but believes that a new chapter of his life has opened after he begins an affair with Edwige. His friends invite him to orgies, which he attends, and he visits a nude beach with Edwige. At the beach, he realizes that the reason he and Edwige get along so well is that they generally misunderstand each other. This scene, and these characters, reveal Kundera's notion that people can never really know each other.

Karel

Karel appears in Part Two. Karel is married to Marketa, and has affairs with several women. His mother is a widow and she has come for a visit at an awkward time. Indeed, Karel, Eva, and Marketa had planned to sleep together during her visit. At the end of Part Two, both he and his wife find their feelings toward his mother to be warmer than they had been earlier.

Kristyna

Kristyna's story is related in Part Five of the novel. She is a young, married woman who lives in a small town, and she works in her husband's butcher shop. She meets a student who is traveling through the town and begins to meet him secretly. They agree that she should come to Prague to visit him once he returns there. Kristyna does so, but does not permit the student to have sex with her as he had hoped.

Milan Kundera

While it might seem strange to list the author of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as one of the characters in the book, he is perhaps the most important character in the novel. Kundera frequently interrupts his stories to speak directly to the reader. Throughout the novel, Kundera gives his personal opinions on history, philosophy, and human nature. While one would usually ascribe these functions to a generic narrator, the autobiographical details related in the book make this distinction somewhat unnecessary. Furthermore, aside from these autobiographical details, Kundera inserts stories where he plays a major role. This intrusive narrator becomes the reader's guide throughout The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and all of the stories in the novel are filtered through his interpretations of them.

Lermentov

Lermentov is the name Kundera gives to a famous poet appearing in Part Five. Historically, Lermentov was a Russian writer and Kundera uses his name to comment on the work by his character.

Mama

Mama is Karel's mother. She appears only in Part Two. At a key moment in this section, she clearly remembers an event from her past, but she cannot accurately remember when the event took place. In addition, she walks in on Marketa, Karel, and Eva as they are beginning their threesome.

Marketa

Marketa is married to Karel. She has overlooked her husband's womanizing in the past, but finds it increasingly difficult. She has never liked her mother-in-law, although she has softened toward her. During the story, Marketa finds herself falling in love with her friend Eva, who is also Karel's mistress.

Michelle

Michelle is a young American girl studying in Europe for the summer. She appears in Part Three. Like her cohort, Gabrielle, she serves as an illustration of ignorance and also as a means to segue into a discussion of angelic and demonic laughter.

Mirek

Mirek is a middle-aged man who, although well educated, has been assigned by the government to work as the foreman of a construction crew. He keeps records about his daily life and conversations, and becomes obsessed with recovering the letters he sent to a former lover whom he now considers to be ugly. While he is attempting to recover the letters he sent to her, the police raid his apartment and take his private papers. Within these papers Mirek has incriminated his friends and family and all of them are sentenced to prison.

Petrarch

Petrarch is the name Kundera gives to a famous Czech poet who appears in Part Five. In actuality, Petrarch is the name of the Italian Renaissance poet who first developed the sonnet. Petrarch's ideas about love were highly stylized. Kundera uses this name to comment on the work of his character, the Czech poet.

Madame Raphael

Madame Raphael appears in Part Three, and she teaches Michelle and Gabrielle. The three women together bear the names of the primary archangels in the Bible. This is noteworthy because Kundera later discusses the difference between angelic and demonic laughter in Part Three of the book.

Tamina

After Kundera himself, Tamina is the most important character in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In many ways, she is a stand in for Kundera himself: she is an exile, she is deeply concerned about the power of memories and the pain of forgetting, and she understands the power of language to both preserve and destroy the past. Kundera writes in Part Six, "It is a novel about Tamina, and whenever Tamina goes offstage, it is a novel for Tamina. She is its principal character and its principal audience, and all the other stories are variations on her own story and meet with her life as in a mirror." Tamina is in her early thirties; she and her husband moved to the country (where she now lives illegally) three years before the story opens. Her husband then dies (again, this occurs before the story opens), and she finds herself alone, working as a waitress and trying to recover her memories of her husband. Tamina believes that she would have a clearer memory of him if she could recover the notebooks in which she detailed her eleven years of marriage. At the end of Part Four, Tamina has given everything she has, even her own celibacy, to try to recover the notebooks, but she is unsuccessful. Later, Tamina finds herself on an island inhabited by children who have no memories of the past. She is sexually abused by the children, and when she tries to escape, she drowns.

Voltaire

Voltaire is the name Kundera gives to a famous university lecturer in Prague. In reality, Voltaire was a famous French writer known for his satire.

The Young Student

The student is a young man who meets Kristyna while vacationing in her small country town. He invites her to Prague, imagining that they will have an affair. When she arrives, he discovers that she is more unsophisticated and less lovely than he remembered, and he is embarrassed to be seen with her. He also wants to attend a meeting of writers on the same evening that Kristyna is in town, so he leaves her at his apartment while he goes to the meeting. When he returns, he discovers that she will not have sex with him, and he is very disappointed. He discovers the next day that it is not because she wants to preserve some romantic notion of their night together, devoid of sex, but rather that she is fearful of becoming pregnant. According to Kundera, the student is the embodiment of litost.

Zdena

Zdena is a woman with a large nose with whom Mirek had an affair some twenty-five years before the story opens. She possesses Mirek's love letters and refuses to part with them. Although Mirek suspects that she is in collusion with the secret police, she actually loves Mirek and wants to protect him.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• Research Czechoslovakia and its history over the course of the twentieth century, then create an illustrated timeline that traces the important political and historical events that occurred. Add lines taken from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that are appropriate to the events described in your timeline.
• Research Franz Kafka's life and read his book The Trial. In what ways does Kafka's novel predict the circumstances in Czechoslovakia under Communist rule? In what ways is Kafka an important influence on Kundera? Write an essay discussing your findings.
• Read George Orwell's 1984. Lead a class discussion comparing and contrasting Orwell's and Kundera's ideas about state censorship and public memory.
• Listen to a symphony by Ludwig von Beethoven, and try to identify major themes and variations. Read several analyses of the symphony to better understand the idea of themes and variations. Now use this knowledge to write an essay about the structure of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. How does Kundera use the ideas of themes and variations in his novel?

THEMES

Memory and Forgetting

Clearly, in a book titled The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, memory and forgetting are likely to be dominant themes. Kundera is particularly interested in exploring how memories are created, then changed over time. In extreme circumstances, such as in the opening segment where a Communist leader is ultimately airbrushed out of Czechoslovakian history, memories can be totally erased. In his preoccupation with the state's intrusion into private memories, Kundera's work recalls George Orwell's 1984. In Orwell's vision of the totalitarian state, public memory is controlled through bureaucrats such as Winston Smith, whose job it is to comb public records and change them according to the most recent edict from the rulers. Thus, someone who has fallen out of favor with the ruling party also falls out of institutional, political, and ultimately, private memory. Like Orwell, Kundera finds state censorship abhorrent, akin to a form of mind control.

Kundera's character Tamina demonstrates yet another facet of memory. In exile in Western Europe, the widowed Tamina finds herself unable to recall all of the details of her life with her late husband. Earlier in her marriage, she wrote down day-to-day events in a series of notebooks she left behind when the couple left Czechoslovakia. Now, with her memories fading, and a part of her own self fading with them, she desperately wants to recover the lost notebooks. Tamina has sacrificed the memory of her sexual life with her husband by having sex with a man who has offered to recover her notebooks for her. Ironically, it is her attempt to recover her memories that ultimately destroys them. Later, she enters a strange dream-like section where a young man promises to take her to a place where she will even forget forgetting.

The Idyll

An idyll is an extremely happy, peaceful, or picturesque episode or scene, typically an idealized or unsustainable one. For example, many people recall their childhoods as idylls. Often, people believe that the world was a kinder place when they were young. However, this idealization usually covers over some real unhappiness. Kundera uses the notion of idyll throughout The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Many of the passages and many of the characters long for an Edenic past, a time such as that in which Adam and Eve enjoyed paradise in the Garden of Eden. Critic François Ricard asserts, however, that the "idyllic conscience" differs from person to person. That is, what one person might define as idyllic is not necessarily what another person would find idyllic. In Kundera's book, each of the characters define the idyll according to their own histories and their own circumstances. In the case of Jan and Edwige, as Ricard points out, their idylls are diametrically opposed to each other, leading to their mutual incomprehension of one another. Kundera uses these two characters to illustrate that individual conceptions of Paradise serve to undermine mutual understanding between people.

For Kundera, one idyll is that of innocence. This idyllic state is represented by the children's island. The children have no memory and exist fully in the present moment. Theirs is a life of unity, conformity, and innocence derived from their lack of memory. For Kundera, it is this lack and this conformity that allows them to commit torture and abuse without guilt. In the novel, Kundera also recalls the early days of the Communist movement as idyllic, a time when he, too, danced in the circle with other Party members before the idyll shattered into totalitarianism.

Opposed to the idyll of innocence is the idyll of experience. Kundera longs for the days when he was part of an innocent idyll as a young member of the Communist party. He is no longer able to be a part of this circle, however. His experience has destroyed his innocence. Although he has found some measure of peace, it is as a critic and a loner, not as a supportive member of a group. Like most of Kundera's ideas and themes, the oppositions between innocence and experience clash against one another.

STYLE

Intrusive Narrator

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera's most noticeable stylistic device is his use of the intrusive narrator. Narration in a novel is simply the manner in which the story is told. The narrator is, likewise, simply the voice that tells the story. An author can choose how noticeable or invisible he or she wishes the narrator to be. Sometimes a writer will choose to make a first person narrator a part of the story itself. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is an example of this; the narrator Nick Carraway both tells the story and participates in it. There is no separation between the narrator and the fiction itself.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, however, Kundera plays a game with the notion of narration by creating a narrator who is named Milan Kundera. As critic John O'Brien writes in Critique: "Kundera weaves an author-figure into his texts with stark autobiographical intrusions." Likewise, Ellen Pifer notes in the Journal of Narrative Technique that "the author's narrating persona exposes both the characters and their author to skeptical scrutiny."

It is tempting to read this narrative "author-figure" as Kundera himself; after all, many of the details that the narrator provides are verifiable details from the author's life. But can the reader make the assumption that the narrative voice in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is actually Kundera the author (and not Kundera the character)? The answer is probably not. A narrative voice is a deliberate creation, crafted to fulfill a specific function in the text, and in that a narrator exists only in words on paper, the narrator/character Milan Kundera cannot be identified as Milan Kundera the writer/person. Because the narrator speaks as if he is the author of the text, and because he speaks of the other characters in the book as characters, the narrator somehow seems more real. This is, however, an illusion, a deliberate blurring by Kundera the writer of the boundaries between fact and fiction. Indeed, when one considers this book carefully, it becomes evident that the narrator is the most important character in the book. He intrudes regularly in the storyline; he calls attention to parts of the story as fiction, and to other parts as history. He offers up bits of autobiography and quotes other writers. It is the narrator who appears to organize the order of events, the construction of the chapters, and the major themes and ideas. Nevertheless, that narrator is a creation, as much as Tamina is a creation.

Setting

The setting of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is so important to the novel that it might as well be another character in the story. Indeed, after the narrator, the setting is the most important stylistic device in the book. The novel is largely about the country of Czechoslovakia; even those segments of the book that take place elsewhere always concern someone who is exiled from Czechoslovakia, someone who wants to return to Czechoslovakia, or someone who cannot leave Czechoslovakia. Oddly, Kundera generally does not refer to the setting as Czechoslovakia, but prefers to call his homeland Bohemia (an older, and more mythical, name that was once used to refer to the region). Nevertheless, the historical events that Kundera recounts belong to the actual history of Czechoslovakia. In several sections of the book, the characters are fearful because they live (or have lived) in a police state that monitors even private thoughts and conversations, and Communist Czechoslovakia was such a place. The result of this fear is a sense of claustrophobia in the sections set in Czechoslovakia. Even the characters who have chosen (or have been forced) to leave Czechoslovakia are controlled by their memories of their homeland, even in their forgetting. For Tamina, for example, it is just as painful to realize that she has forgotten parts of her life as it is to recall them. Kundera the narrator also speaks of his homeland with nostalgia and longing.

In addition to the geographic setting of the book, the temporal setting is equally important. The book was written between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989. In 1968, artists and writers were briefly able to speak their minds more freely than at any time during the previous two decades. However, many of these artists and writers were severely punished when the country returned to Communist rule by August of 1968. Oppression is all the more bitter when it follows a respite, and the satiric elements of the text reflect that bitterness. Furthermore, the images of the border that Kundera constructs only operate when the border is strictly enforced, as it was before the fall of the Soviet Union. Indeed, it is this impermeable border that creates the entire sense of exile. Emigreés who can return at will to the homeland do not have the same sense of exclusion as exiles who have had their citizenship revoked and for whom the homeland can exist only in memory. Tamina's story, for example, is only possible because she is in exile and cannot return to her home to recover her letters (which represent her memories). Across the border, she loses all sense of herself and of her identity. Consequently, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting requires both the geographic and the temporal setting to give the different strands of the novel an overall sense of connection.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Czechoslovakia in the Twentieth Century

Until the end of World War I, Czechoslovakia was not one nation but rather several separate regions ruled by the Habsburg Monarchy, then the Austrian Empire, and finally the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The people living in these regions were largely Czechs, living in Bohemia and Moravia; and Slovaks, living in Slovakia. In 1918, with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire brought about by the Allied victory in World War I, the Czechs and the Slovaks combined their joint territories as the independent Republic of Czechoslovakia. The country enjoyed roughly twenty years of democracy after World War I.

In 1938, however, under the guise of protecting the German-speaking people of the Sudetenland (a small region of Czechoslovakia), Nazi troops marched into the country. England and France attempted to appease the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and prevent another war by entering into the Munich Agreement, an act that disillusioned and disheartened the Czech and Slovak people. Hitler flouted the terms of the Agreement and ultimately overran the whole of Czechoslovakia. His troops occupied Prague, and many Czechs and Slovaks were sent to concentration camps. World War II ensued, and the exiled Czechoslovakian government, as well as the Czechoslovakian army, fought on the side of the Allied nations (against Nazi Germany).

At the close of World War II, following Hitler's defeat, the Communist Party grew dramatically, largely due to the warmth that Czechs felt toward the Soviet Union, whose troops were responsible for liberating Czechoslovakia from the Germans. In addition, many Czechs and Slovaks were disenchanted with what they viewed as abandonment by the West during Hitler's rampage. In 1948, the Communist People's Militia was successful in taking over Prague, forming an all-Communist government. The government bore a striking resemblance to Joseph Stalin's dictatorship of the Soviet Union, and the Soviets largely controlled the Czechoslovakian government. During the next twenty years, the Communist Party ruled all facets of life in Czechoslovakia; their reach extended not only to the government, but to the private lives of citizens. All art, culture, and education were under Communist control.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

• 1960s: As part of the Warsaw Pact, Czechoslovakia is firmly under the control of the Soviet Union. In Czechoslovakia itself, a totalitarian Communist government is installed.

  Today: The Czech Republic is a member of the North Alliance Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance that includes most western European nations as well as the United States. The government is a parliamentary republic.

• 1960s: Under the leadership of Alexander Dubcek and other intellectuals, restrictions are gradually lifted on Czechoslovakian citizens. This triggers a military response from the Soviet Union. Their troops enter the country with tanks and restore control to hard-line Communists. Travel to and from Czechoslovakia is restricted by the government.

  Today: The Czech Republic and Slovakia are full members of the European Union, having received membership on May 1, 2004, after a decade of economic reforms. Tourism is a major industry for both countries.

• 1960s: Many writers and artists go into exile after suffering punishment and repression in Czechoslovakia. Those that remain must submit their work to the government for approval or censorship. Many writers, such as Milan Kundera, continue to write without publishing or write under assumed names.

  Today: Works by writers such as Milan Kundera and other dissidents circulate freely in the Czech language. Many exiled artists and writers are able to return home for visits or have returned to live there permanently.

The Prague Spring of 1968 and the Soviet Invasion

In the 1960s, intellectuals (including Milan Kundera) under the leadership of Alexander Dubcek, attempted to reform their government. Life became briefly less repressive, and artists and writers flourished. In 1967, Kundera gave a famous speech to the Fourth Czechoslovak Writers

Congress in which he called for an end to censorship. The gesture was not without consequence, however; many who spoke up against the state were later punished. Nevertheless, Dubcek, rising to the position of Secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party in January, 1968, introduced a series of reforms aimed at improving life in Czechoslovakia. Dubcek, raised in the Soviet Union, was undoubtedly a committed Communist, convinced that the ideals of the Party were worth keeping. Nevertheless, he also believed that the Party was badly in need of reform. Thus, artists, musicians, writers, and the general population of Czechoslovakia experienced a few months of relative freedom after Dubcek came to power. This period became known as the Prague Spring.

The permissive activities in Czechoslovakia were viewed as threat to the Soviet Union. The Soviets feared that the so-called rebellion in Czechoslovakia might spill over into other nations such as Poland. Consequently, in August of 1968, Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia. Where there had been dancing in the streets of Prague just weeks earlier, now tanks rolled through the city.

Dubcek was quickly removed from power, and all the reforms that he had instituted were rescinded. The Soviets placed a new leader as head of government, and instituted an even more repressive state than the one that had preceded the Prague Spring. Kundera and other writers who had been a part of the Prague Spring movement lost their jobs, and were prohibited from publishing and even from speaking publicly. They were also not allowed to travel outside of Czechoslovakia, though Kundera finally received permission to leave in 1975.

For the next two decades, Czechoslovakia was a closed society, even as the Soviet Union became more liberal under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev. The fall of the Berlin Wall, however, opened the door for political change. In November and December of 1989, in what became known as the "Velvet Revolution," the Communist government was peacefully removed from power and a new democracy was established.

The growth of Slovakian nationalism led to another change in Czechoslovakia, however. In 1992, against the wishes of President Václav Havel, the nation voted to split into two nations, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Written in Czechoslovakian, but first published in French in 1979, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting became a literary sensation that was promptly released in English in 1980. Since that time, and with the subsequent publication of important works such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera has been the subject of intense critical scrutiny.

In an early review of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Ted Solotaroff writes in the New Republic that Kundera "identifies the demonic with the burdens of history, adulthood, memory, remorse, and love; the angelic with the innocence, indifference, present-mindedness, sensuality, and conformity of childhood."

Later critics attempted to identify the main themes of the book. For example, R. B. Gill argues in Critique that laughter is the essential theme of the book: "Breaking through artificial limits of all kinds, [Kundera's] liberating laughter arises from humane individualism in a sad world of constrictions." Other critics see the novel as a treatise on the history of Czechoslovakia and on the nature of history itself. Nina Pelikan Straus, also writing in Critique, argues that The Book of Laughter and Forgetting "reveals the endangered positions of words, images, and theories in a historical context that subjects them to revision and deconstruction through the discourse of political orthodoxy." Vicki Adams, writing in Imagination, Emblems and Expressions: Essays on Latin American, Caribbean, and Continental Culture and Identity, also focuses on history, and Kundera's understanding of its malleable nature. She writes:

Kundera's view of history has more to do with disorder than triumph of meaning. While his sentimental side yearns for a safe, unchanging, constantly returning, idyllic past, his skepticism tells us that … alternative accounts are possible when authorities in Czechoslovakia tear down the old heroic monuments, give the streets new Russian names, and fabricate in schools a tidy and sentimental account of Czech history.

Likewise, Sheena Patchay, writing in JLS/TLW, persuasively argues that Kundera uses "fiction to comment on the way in which history has deliberately papered over the cracks of Czechoslovakian history, specifically the Russian Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968."

While the international audience has found Kundera's account of Czechoslovakian culture and history compelling, Czech critics have given the author's work a cooler reception. In a 2003 article in Kosmas, Petr Hruby concludes that while "it can be said that Kundera is an extremely capable, innovative and internationally successful writer," he is "also a man who has been severely criticized by his Czech colleagues, mainly for the dissimulation of his Communist past."

Nevertheless, other critics comment on the way that The Book of Laughter and Forgetting changes expectations. Jonathan Wilson asserts in the Literary Review that "Kundera has embarked upon an attempt to broaden the novel genre to consume all other genres of writing." Likewise, Fred Misurella in his book Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs goes so far as to argue that in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, "Kundera created a historic shift in the way the contemporary audience regards the novel." No longer is the novel a plot-driven story with beginning, middle, and end. Instead, it may be a combination of many genres, including story, fable, allegory, history, philosophy, essay, and memoir. As British literary theorist Terry Eagleton writes in Salmagundi, Kundera "treats the novel as a place where you can write anything you like, anything, as it were, that has just come into your head, as a genre released from constraint rather in the manner of a diary."

That so many critics find so many ways of reading Kundera's work in general, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in particular, demonstrates the richness of the author's writing. It is likely that his work will continue to elicit intense critical debate throughout the twenty-first century.

CRITICISM

Diane Andrews Henningfeld

Henningfeld is a professor of English who writes widely on literature and theory. In the followingessay, she examines The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as an example of magical realism.

During the second half of the twentieth century, the term "magical realism" was coined for an artistic genre that included magical elements in an otherwise realistic setting. Often, in such artistic creations, the magical is treated as ordinary, and the ordinary treated as strange and marvelous. Originally, the term applied strictly to visual art; however, by the 1960s, the term also came to be applied to literature. Magical realism became closely associated during the 1960s and the 1970s with South American writers such as Gabriel Garcí a Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Jorge Luis Borges. However, the use of magical realism was not limited to Latin America, but rather became a world-wide phenomenon. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, for example, provides a European articulation of magical realism. An examination of this text through the lens of magical realism provides insight into the genre as well as into the book itself.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• The Unbearable Lightness of Being is perhaps Kundera's best known work to English-speaking audiences. Published in 1984 in both Paris and New York, and made into a movie in 1989, the book is about the ambiguities and paradoxes of human existence.
• Laurence Sterne's classic 1759 novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman is available in a 2004 Modern Library edition with an introduction by Robert Folkenflik. This novel, perhaps more than any other in English, utilizes the device of the intrusive narrator with hilarious results. Kundera names Sterne as one of his literary influences.
• Franz Kafka, born in Prague in 1883, wrote a number of books that were influential on Kundera's writing. The Trial, written in 1920 and published in 1925, prefigures many of the events that came to pass in Czechoslovakia as a result of Communist totalitarianism.
• Mark Kurlansky's 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (2004) provides an overview of events that occurred throughout the world in 1968, putting the Prague Spring in a global perspective.
• Milan Kundera (2003), edited by Harold Bloom, provides fourteen critiques of Kundera's work by noted scholars, including a chapter on The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

Wendy B. Faris, in her book Magical Realism, lists a number of characteristics of this literary style. Using her framework, it is possible to definitively place The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as a work of magical realism. Faris first notes that the magical realist "text contains an ‘irreducible element’ of magic, something we cannot explain according to the laws of the universe as we know them." Magic does not present itself in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting until the third section of the text. In this section, a completely realistic scenario of two American girls studying in Europe for the summer takes on a strange, magical cast. Kundera takes ordinary, realistic events, and renders them opaque and mysterious. For example, he describes the simple fact of the girls' laughter as follows: "They emitted short, shrill, spasmodic sounds very difficult to describe in words." This terminology makes the laughter seem somewhat strange, yet the fact that the girls laugh is not at all out of the ordinary. Later in the chapter, on the other hand, Kundera matter-of-factly describes an event without additional comment that is most definitely magical. In this scene, the two young girls and their teacher begin to dance and laugh, with the following result: "Suddenly Madame Raphael stamped her foot harder and rose a few centimeters above the floor, and then, with the next step, was no longer touching the ground." A few moments later, all three of the dancers begin to rise toward the ceiling: "When their hair touched the ceiling, it started little by little to open. They rose higher and higher through that opening … and now there were only three pairs of shoes passing through the gaping hole." While the other students look on dumbfounded, Kundera ends the scene without interpretation or explanation, allowing his readers to make of it what they will.

Faris also argues that "metafictional dimensions are common in contemporary magical realism." Metafiction is a literary device in which a work of fiction comments on its own fictional nature. Certainly, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting amply illustrates Kundera's use of metafiction. Kundera begins Part Four of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by stating: "I calculate that two or three new fictional characters are baptized here on earth every second. … This time, to make clear that my heroine is mine and only mine (I am more attached to her than to any other), I am giving her a name no woman has ever before borne: Tamina." By intruding on the narrative to remind the reader that Tamina is a fictional character, Kundera undercuts the illusion of reality that traditional fiction attempts to maintain. Likewise, a little later in the chapter, Kundera directly tells readers that what they are reading is fiction, not real life: "This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme." Kundera thus not only reminds readers that they are reading fiction, he also tells them how he has structured the fiction. By constantly commenting on his work as fiction, he demonstrates that language can be shaped, changed, revised, and erased. Consequently, Tamina's story can be anything that the writer wishes. When Tamina, therefore, finds herself on the children's island, it is no more nor less "real" than when Tamina finds herself waiting tables in the restaurant. Both situations are equally created by the writer. In many ways, Kundera's use of metafiction allows for the seamless intrusion of magical situations and scenes.

Faris also argues that in magical realist texts, "descriptions detail a strong presence of the phenomenal world—this is the realism in magical realism, distinguishing it from much fantasy and allegory." In other words, texts of this genre include concrete details about the world as it is experienced through the senses. For the most part, the world that the writer presents closely mirrors the real world. Indeed, the details of the fictional world correspond to the real world, but the insertion of magical elements serves again to undercut the relationship between the text and the real world.

For Kundera, such a strategy serves an important purpose: he is able to demonstrate the way that all texts, including historical texts, can be altered, changed, or erased to fit the needs of its authors. Consequently, while Kundera includes realistic details about Czechoslovakian history in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, his inclusion of magical scenes reminds readers that historical texts are no more true than fictional texts.

Finally, Faris writes that magical realist texts are antibureaucratic and often share "a carnivalesque spirit." That The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is antibureaucratic nearly goes without saying. Throughout the novel, Kundera satirizes and parodies the Communist bureaucracy of the Czechoslovakian government, so much so that the book cost him his Czechoslovakian citizenship. He is sharply critical of the government's intrusion in the private lives of its citizens.

The book's "carnivalesque spirit" is evident in its laughter. Kundera's laughter is that of the subversive; it is individualistic, and iconoclastic. It is, as Kundera himself defines it, demonic. Furthermore, Carnival, the period immediately preceding Lent, is traditionally a time of pointed celebration, emphasizing the lewd and the irrational. Also during Carnival, traditions are subverted, and the Church and governments are subjected to parody and satire. Likewise, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting contains many such elements. When Tamina is on the children's island, she is in a world where traditions are subverted. Tamina is subject to the childrens' customs and rules just as children are typically subject to adults' rules. Even more disturbing is the children's lewd fascination with Tamina's body. Her virtual rape causes her to lose all sense of herself. The scenes in which she is abused seem almost dreamlike or hallucinatory, yet they are nonetheless horrifying. Indeed, such scenes would be impossible in a realistic text; the use of magical realism, on the other hand, allows Kundera to create alternate versions of reality that better describe his fundamental themes of laughter and forgetting.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera violates the basic laws of nature. Yet, through these violations, Kundera strives to achieve a certain truth. This essential paradox mirrors the ambiguity of human existence as Kundera sees it: that life is only and always experienced at the individual, lonely level (as is death). After death, the memories that create the individual persona vanish, and ultimately, all people are forgotten. In the face of this terrible truth, Kundera inserts the magical, and laughs.

Source: Diane Andrews Henningfeld, Critical Essay on The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, in Novels for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2008.

Hana Píchová

In the following excerpt, Píchová argues that Tamina is the central character of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Píchová also claims that personal memories are necessary for existence, and that Tamina's failure to sustain her memories leads ultimately to her death.

Tamina—about whom the narrator of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) says, "It is a novel about Tamina, and whenever Tamina is absent, it is a novel for Tamina"—is one of the most heart-wrenching heroines in all of Kundera's fiction. Struggling to connect a bleak present with the recuperative fragments of the past, Tamina first tries to reconstruct her past life by writing down dates and places of its events. Later, her fear of continual forgetting leads to desperate attempts to retrieve eleven notebooks, left behind in Prague, that document her life before exile. When she fails and the diaries remain locked in a desk drawer behind the iron curtain, death soon follows for Tamina; she winds up trapped on a strange island inhabited solely by children, where no past or memories exist. Her story, although it appears deceptively simple, is integral to the entire narrative of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The story of Tamina, especially because of her failure, dramatizes the importance of sustaining personal memory through imaginative links to the past.

Tamina's ultimate failure to sustain imaginative connections is most clearly represented through her inability to re-create or retrieve her lost notebooks. At first, when Tamina is still in Czechoslovakia, her husband, who is ten years older than she and thus has "some idea of how poor the human memory can be," encourages her to keep a diary of their shared life. She complies, despite regarding this writing exercise as a mundane chore. The many empty pages and the overall fragmentary nature of her entries reveal Tamina's lack of interest and creativity. She is capable of only a literal transcription of the "days of dissatisfaction, quarrels, even boredom."

However, Tamina's husband dies shortly after their emigration, and once she is alone in exile, the diaries left behind in a desk drawer at her mother-in-law's house become increasingly important. They become her only means of recovering the past, the life she shared with her husband in Czechoslovakia. Since Tamina, as a political émigré, is unable to retrieve the diaries herself, she first tries to rewrite them: "Her project, like Don Quixote's, is predicated on an on an ingenuous belief that words and images in the mind possess the power to resurrect the past." Driven by the prospect of mimetically re-creating the past, she buys a new notebook and divides it into eleven parts, one part for each of the lost years of her life. But because in exile Tamina shares her past with no one with whom to double-check a forgotten event or date, and because she is unable to revisit the specific physical places that might help her recall events, she has a difficult time re-creating the precise details of her life. Devastated because she has "lost all sense of chronology," as well as any sense of location, and is thus unable to transcribe the exact dates and vacation spots of all eleven years, Tamina gives up on the project. It is this obsession with specific details that prevents her from re-creating the past more spontaneously, imaginatively, and freely, which ultimately prevents her from recreating it at all.

Finally, Tamina decides that the only other means of regaining her personal past is by reclaiming the original notebooks. She asks her Western acquaintances to go to Prague and pick up the diaries at her mother-in-law's house. Thus, through these acquaintances, Tamina is trying to build an artificial bridge between the two countries, a bridge that would allow her past to be carried over onto the new shore. Significantly, she never tells these acquaintances the true contents of the diaries. Tamina's silence on this issue is tied to the protection of her identity, for she feels that, if her private life were to be made public, she would be stripped of her identity.

She realized that what gave her written memories value, meaning, was that they were meant for her alone. As soon as they lost that quality, the intimate chain binding her to them would be broken, and instead of reading them with her own eyes, she would be forced to read them from the point of view of an audience perusing an impersonal document. Then the woman who wrote them would lose her identity, and the striking similarity that would nonetheless remain between her and the author of the notes would be nothing but a parody, a mockery.

It is not only the alteration of Tamina's eyes—reading her life from an outsider's perspective—that is at stake here. Tamina is also worried about the eyes of others; she compares them to "rain washing away inscriptions on a stone wall. Or light ruining a print by hitting photographic paper before it goes into the developer." In essence, she believes that these eyes have the power to destroy or erase the contents of her diaries, which now represent not just her identity but her entire life. Tamina knows that there is no need to worry about the prying curiosity of her acquaintances because they are too self-absorbed to ask any questions. She is, however, justifiably concerned with the interrogative gaze of the Czech secret police, who read all correspondence with foreign countries, and that is why she never has her mother-in-law mail the diaries. At the end, ironically, it is the very mother-in-law entrusted with these documents whose curiosity desecrates Tamina's private world.

The other motivation for Tamina's silence about what it is that she so desperately wants to retrieve is a cultural difference she encounters in the West. She feels that here privacy is not as sacred as it was behind the iron curtain, where people had nothing left but their few private moments, and even private moments were constantly jeopardized by the ever-present secret police. Explaining to her acquaintances why she needs to keep her personal life private would prove difficult, if not impossible, because here people, as if to mock privacy, voluntarily give up their most intimate moments. This cultural difference becomes especially evident when Tamina and her acquaintances watch television together.

"The first time I had sex I was fifteen"—the round old head looked proudly from one panel member to the next—"that's right, fifteen. I am now sixty-five. That means a sex life of fifty years' duration. Assuming I have made love on the average of twice a week—a very modest estimate—that means a hundred times a year or five thousand times so far. Let's go on. If an orgasm lasts five seconds, I have twenty-five thousand seconds of orgasm to my credit. Which comes to a total of six hours and fifty-six minutes. Not bad, eh?"

Unlike her acquaintances, who take the old man's bragging seriously, Tamina bursts out laughing, envisioning a continuous orgasm that makes the old man first lose his false teeth and then suffer a heart attack. His imagined death is grotesque, as well as revealing. To Tamina, the reduction of a life to a single act repeated without pause—an act that has been stripped of privacy, past, meaning, and context—is not glorious but deadly.

However, it is not only the cultural difference based on the importance of privacy that prevents Tamina from ever discussing her personal past. It is also her overall unwillingness to bridge the two cultures herself, for she realizes that it would be impossible to explain her previous life to nonémigrés in a way that would preserve and honor its richness and complexity: "Tamina had long since realized that if she wanted to make her life comprehensible to people here she had to simplify it. It would have been impossibly complicated to explain why private letters and diaries might be confiscated and why she set such great store by them." So Tamina allows these go-betweens to believe that the diaries are political documents, for as such their importance would seemingly be obvious and understandable. The narrator reflects Tamina's inability ever to explain fully her native country's historical reality by creating a textual gap precisely at the one moment she is "making a long and impassioned speech" about the situation in Czechoslovakia to Hugo, one of the potential retrievers of her diaries. The content of this long, impassioned speech, especially significant because it is the only speech that Tamina makes about her country, is not only missing, unnarrated, but the omission is emphasized by the narrator's following comment on the veracity of Tamina's words: "She knew the country inside out, and I can tell you—everything she said was true." The narrator's emphasis on the truth of Tamina's speech ironically calls attention to its inaccessibility to the reader. The narrator is reflecting Tamina's cultural difficulty on the structural level of the text here, but perhaps he is also suggesting that to bridge a cultural gap that separates an émigré from a nonémigré is nearly impossible.

When Tamina realizes that her diaries will never be retrieved (her last prospect ends with Hugo, who out of sexual and emotional frustration is unwilling to undertake the trip to Czechoslovakia), she collapses into a blurred and faded existence, into an abyss. No longer responsive to her customers, no longer lending them her ear, and no longer participating in their conversations, she alienates herself from the lives of those around her through silence. In essence, Tamina voluntarily chooses to exacerbate her outer, physical exile with an inner one. The double exile naturally results in a reductive existence. From now on, Tamina only silently and mechanically serves coffee, nevermore inquiring about her surroundings, nevermore phoning back home to ask about the diaries. The first section to deal with Tamina's story comes to a cold and simple narrative end: "She went on serving coffee and never made another call to Czechoslovakia."

Tamina's silenced present existence is reflected in the structural layout of the narrative, for her story is interrupted immediately following the line about her mechanically serving coffee. The narrator abruptly abandons the narrative thread of Tamina's story and begins a new part, which introduces other characters and issues. Part 2 presents the story of unfulfilled love between a butcher's wife, Kristýna, and a poet-student who spends an evening of debauchery with many famous Czech poets, a story that includes a discussion of the Czech word lítost, which according to the narrator does not translate exactly into any other language. The narrator, in fact, takes the time to explain that lítost is an open word denoting many different meanings all fused together: "It designates a feeling as infinite as an open accordion, a feeling that is the synthesis of many others: grief, sympathy, remorse, and an indefinable longing. The first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog." The untranslatability of this word creates an epistemological gap within the text. In essence, translators are warned that they cannot do justice in translating this word and that the Czech original will always denote more than the translation. This linguistic gap mirrors the inherent cultural gap implied in Tamina's section.

Not until part 6, some forty pages later, does the narrator finally return to Tamina. This gap in the story line represents the narrator's own temporary exile of Tamina, as if to reflect her self-imposed exile, as if to honor her desire for silence. The double treatment of her story, in two distinct sections of the narrative (parts 4 and 6), also structurally mirrors the heroine's own doubly exiled existence (inner and outer).

The narrator's return to Tamina begins with the pronouncement that she simply disappeared one day (as she had from the text), explaining that the local police placed her name in the file of "Permanently Missing," "a bureaucratic category easily applied to the dead or exiled." Only then are we given a more detailed account of her disappearance. One day a young man in jeans walks into the café where Tamina works, and he strikes up a conversation. The reason Tamina breaks her silence and responds to this man is that he differs from all the others; he does not speak about himself but instead directs his fast-paced sentences at her. He encourages her, "Forget your forgetting," as he reveals to Tamina, "what she calls remembering is in fact something different, that in fact she is under a spell and watching herself forget." In the original, as pointed out by Maria Nĕmcová Banerjee, the conversion of remembering to forgetting is underscored by a common verbal root that the words share—vzpomínání (the act of remembering) and zapomínání (the act of forgetting)—thus "remembrance turns into forgetting with a simple flip of a prefix (za- instead of vz-)" (TP 175-76). Furthermore, the man offers Tamina the classic vacation line—"Haven't you ever felt like getting away from it all?"—describing the place to which he can take her as a place "where things are as light as the breeze, where things have no weight." Tamina agrees to ride off in a red sports car with this young man, whose name, Raphael, is "not the least bit accidental."

The critic Fred Misurella takes up the narrator's hint and explores just how Raphael's name is more than accidental by reflecting on the angel Raphael in the Book of Tobit, a story found in the Apocrypha. The biblical story is indeed of interest here, for it contains parallels to Tamina's story in its concern with exiles and a journey guided by an angel, Raphael, to retrieve something from the past. The story is as follows:

The ostensible setting of the story is the Assyrian capital, Nineveh, where the people of Northern Israel had been taken captive in the latter part of the eighth century B.C. (2 Kg. 17.1-6). There, it is said, dwelt the pious Tobit, who, despite his many charitable deeds, became blind and poor (chs. 1-2). But God heard his prayer, as well as the prayer of demon-haunted Sarah in faraway Media, and sent the angel Raphael to save them both (ch. 3). When Tobit commissioned his son Tobias to collect a deposit of money he had made long before in Media, the angel accompanied him and revealed magic formulas which would heal his father's blindness and exorcise Sarah's demon-lover, Asmodeus (chs. 4-6). Tobias successfully completed his mission and married Sarah (chs. 7-14).

In the biblical story, Raphael is an invaluable angelic intercessor who, with his magical powers, fulfills prayers and protects against evil. Tamina's Raphael, on the other hand, although he does act as a guide who helps to retrieve a moment from her past, ultimately proves to be far different from the helpful biblical guide. As elsewhere in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, this angel is instead a frightening representative of a lifestyle that promotes the dangerous laughter of forgetting, which ends in death.

Tamina understands the danger of what Raphael represents and offers only after it is too late to resist the seductive lure of forgetting. When Raphael stops the car and they stand at the top of a clay slope with an abandoned bulldozer nearby, she suddenly experiences a strong sense of déjà vu, a feeling that the landscape looks "exactly like the terrain around where her husband worked in Czechoslovakia." She remembers the anguished love of their long-ago Sunday walks together, made more poignant because her husband had been fired from his original job and had become a bulldozer operator, and she could get from Prague to see him only once a week. She is overwhelmed by a sense of despair similar to what she felt then and is "glad for the lost fragment of the past [that the landscape] had unexpectedly returned to her." For a brief moment, the two worlds have metaphorically merged for Tamina; she has created a bridge between the two shores. Therefore, feeling that her husband remains alive in her grief, just as all memories remain alive in the emotions of those still living, she begins to regret her decision to accompany Raphael. The narrative moves into exclamatory, free, indirect discourse to emphasize the importance of Tamina's epiphany: "No, no, her husband was still alive in her grief, just lost that's all, and it was her job to look for him! Search the whole world over! Yes, yes! Now she understood. Finally! We will never remember anything by sitting in one place waiting for the memories to come back to us of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the world. We must travel if we want to find them and flush them from their hiding places!" Although Tamina's thoughts are powerful and passionate, they are never expressed aloud. On the outside, she remains passive; as if to confirm this passivity, she obediently joins Raphael's infectious laughter, a laughter that promises to erase her misery, a laughter that signals forgetting. And now Raphael truly becomes the messenger of forgetting when he grabs Tamina by the arm and both slide down the slippery slope of the clay bank, a "concrete" portrayal of the slide down the figurative slippery slope of no return. At the edge of the water is a rowboat ready with a boy who will become Tamina's new guide. Tamina's journey is increasingly turning into an allegorical one, and as noted by Misurella, "It's hard not to see this water as mythical—as the Lethe, for instance, the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology, or the Acheron, the river Dante has dividing the borderland of Hell from Limbo" (39-40). From here Tamina is taken to the hauntingly perverse island of children, an island without past, without memory, without individual distinctions.

Just as the salesman Gregor Samsa of Kafka's Metamorphosis, whose transformation into a large insect during a night of bad dreams, has been interpreted as a literalization of his passive acceptance of humiliation and drudgery in his day-to-day life, Tamina too, we might say, is being punished by getting what she wants. If she wants to forget, she will be escorted away "to the place she had always longed to be; she had slipped back in time to a point where her husband did not exist in either memory or desire and where consequently she felt neither pressure nor remorse." In fact, an allusion to Kafka's Gregor Samsa is evident as Tamina departs with Raphael at the beginning of this section of the narration. When Tamina agrees (to Raphael's guidance) "in a dreamy voice" to go to this place "where things weigh nothing at all," the narrator steps in to tell us, "And as in a fairy-tale, as in a dream (no, it is a fairy-tale, it is a dream!), Tamina walks out from behind the corner." Recalling the famous opening paragraph of Kafka's story, in which the narrator bluntly emphasizes, "It was no dream," the denial of simile or metaphor in these lines from Kundera's text ironically suggests the opposite of what they say, for fairy tales or dreams are, of course, highly metaphorical. These lines are also ironic because Tamina's departure with Raphael quickly changes from a meeting narrated in plausibly realistic fashion to a journey marked by signs of the mythic or the fantastic: she is guided across a body of water by a strange, sexually precocious boy and then resides on an island inhabited solely by children, where the narrative slips into an allegorical or fairy-tale-like unreality. Tamina's ultimately fatal immersion in this world of literalized metaphor, or fairy tales come too frighteningly true, also serves to emphasize her inability to use metaphor or her imagination successfully to bridge the gap separating her from her past. Instead, she has repeatedly tried to re-create the past literally (by attempting to write a mirror copy of the lost notebooks and by planning to send people to retrieve the notebooks). Her failure suggests that such a literal return or recuperation is impossible and that, without an imaginative bridge, all access to the past is lost. Tamina fails to cross imaginatively over the geographic and temporal borders separating her from her past, and so she is led passively away into a metaphorical version of the kind of existence she has chosen for herself through this failure, an isolated island with no bridges of any kind, where she is condemned to a timeless, meaningless exile.

The island represents a frightful parody of the Pioneer camps found "everywhere east of the Elbe" and of utopian worlds built on innocence, inexperience, and the present tense. It is depicted as "enormously" different from the landscape she has left behind. All is green here as if it were a giant playground. What Tamina notices is the diminutiveness of the entire place as symbolized by the volleyball nets that are too close to the ground. Children are the only occupants of this island, and thus all is catered to their needs. The dormitories contain big open rooms full of little beds. The lack of privacy is most notable at evening's washing. The children, divided by groups, labeled with animal names, partake in an organized bathroom ritual. Since Tamina stands out as the only mature person among these children, she soon becomes an object of sexual discovery. The children touch her body, exploring, probing, as if she were "an open watch or a fly whose wings had been torn off." The wingless-fly simile foreshadows the switch that occurs in the minds of the children: the innocent touching suddenly leads to the desire to cause pain. The narrator explains this sudden shift: "Their only motive for causing pain to someone not of their world is to glorify that world and its law." Of course, Tamina realizes that she can no longer function in this world of dwarfs playing hopscotch and provocatively dancing as if "imitating intercourse" to the idiocy of guitars. She decides to escape the children's island, a place that offers only the opposite of her previous existence, a buoyant meaningless present. Tamina swims away. But no shores appear and so she drowns. Despite Tamina's death, however, the ending provides some sense of optimism. After all, she does escape this meaningless world, unwilling to conform to the rules laid out by the children, unwilling to lose her memory fully and thus her identity.

Yet another interpretive possibility comes to mind in regard to the children's island. The narrator's statement introducing the second part of Tamina's story, "as in a fairy-tale, as in a dream (no, it is a fairy-tale, it is a dream!)," hints that all this indeed may be a dream. Given Tamina's situation, it would be atypical if she did not suffer from what may be termed émigré nightmares. These nightmares appear to most people who find themselves in exile, especially in the first few years. The basic situation presented in these dreams—all are quite similar and repetitive in nature—is that an émigré finds a way back to the home country. The realization that being here is dangerous comes very quickly to the émigré. A desperate journey back to the country of exile follows but generally fails. The émigré wakes up with a feeling of desperate homelessness and utter alienation.

The second part of Tamina's story follows the general pattern of such a dream. At first, Tamina finds a way to go back; the children's island represents the homeland, even if not fully recognizable. Of course, Tamina does not fit in; her situation even becomes dangerous when the children begin to hate her, and her need to leave this world grows stronger and stronger with each new day. Her attempt to swim back to the other shore, the country of exile, of freedom, fails. Tamina is left in between the two countries, helpless, alone, uncomprehended, and purposeless …

Source: Hana Píchová, "Variations on Letters and Bowler Hats," in The Art of Memory in Exile: Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera, Southern Illinois University Press, 2002, pp. 46-66.

Norman Podhoretz

In the following excerpt, Norman Podhoretz addresses an open letter to Milan Kundera telling of his experience reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Podhoretz cites the "intellectual force" of the novel as its most important feature. He then goes on to assert that the novel is about how Communism affects society, and that the theme of the novel centers on totalitarianism.

Dear Milan Kundera:

About four years ago, a copy of the bound galleys of your novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, came into my office for review. As a magazine editor I get so many books every week in that form that unless I have a special reason I rarely do more than glance at their titles. In the case of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting I had no such special reason. By 1980 your name should have been more familiar to me, but in fact I had only a vague impression of you as an East European dissident—so vague that, I am now ashamed to confess, I could not have said for certain which country you came from: Hungary? Yugoslavia? Czechoslovakia? Perhaps even Poland?

Nor was I particularly curious about you either as an individual or as a member of the class of "East" European dissident writers. This was not because I was or am unsympathetic to dissidents in Communist regimes or those living in exile in the West. On the contrary, as a passionate anti-Communist, I am all too sympathetic—at least for their own good as writers.

"How many books about the horrors of life under Communism am I supposed to read? How many ought I to read?" asks William F. Buckley, Jr., another member of the radically diminished fraternity of unregenerate anti-Communists in the American intellectual world. Like Buckley, I felt that there were a good many people who still needed to learn about "the horrors of life under Communism," but that I was not one of them. Pleased though I was to see books by dissidents from behind the Iron Curtain published and disseminated, I resisted reading any more of them myself.

What then induced me to begin reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting? I have no idea. Knowing your work as well as I do now, I can almost visualize myself as a character in a Kundera novel, standing in front of the cabinet in my office where review copies of new books are kept, suddenly being seized by one of them while you, the author, break into the picture to search speculatively for the cause. But whatever answer you might come up with, I have none. I simply do not know why I should have been drawn against so much resistance to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. What I do know is that once I had begun reading it, I was transfixed.

Twenty-five years ago, as a young literary critic, I was sent an advance copy of a book of poems called Life Studies. It was by Robert Lowell, a poet already famous and much honored in America, but whose earlier work had generally left me cold. I therefore opened Life Studies with no great expectation of pleasure, but what I found there was more than pleasure. Reading it, I told Lowell in a note thanking him for the book, made me remember, as no other new volume of verse had for a long time, why I had become interested in poetry in the first place. That is exactly what The Book of Laughter and Forgetting did for my old love of the novel—alove grown cold and stale and dutiful.

During my years as a literary critic, I specialized in contemporary fiction, and one of the reasons I eventually gave up on criticism was that the novels I was reading seemed to me less and less worth writing about. They might be more or less interesting, more or less amusing, but mostly they told me more about their authors, and less about life or the world, than I wanted or needed to know. Once upon a time the novel (as its English name suggests) had been a bringer of news; or (to put it in the terms you yourself use in a recent essay entitled "The Novel and Europe") its mission had been to "uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence." But novel after novel was now "only confirming what had already been said."

That is how you characterize the "hundreds and thousands of novels published in huge editions and widely read in Communist Russia." But "confirming what had already been said" was precisely what most of the novels written and published in the democratic West, including many honored for boldness and originality, were also doing. This was the situation twenty years ago, and it is perhaps even worse today. I do not, of course, mean that our novelists follow an official "party line," either directly or in some broader sense. What I do mean is that the most esteemed novels of our age in the West often seem to have as their main purpose the reinforcement of the by now endlessly reiterated idea that literary people are superior in every way to the businessmen, the politicians, the workers among whom they live—that they are more intelligent, more sensitive, and morally finer than everyone else.

You write, in the same essay from which I have just quoted, that "Every novel says to the reader: ‘Things are not as simple as you think.’" This may be true of the best, the greatest, of novels. But it is not true of most contemporary American novels. Most contemporary American novels invite the reader to join with the author in a luxuriously complacent celebration of themselves and of the stock prejudices and bigotries of the "advanced" literary culture against the middle-class world around them. Flaubert could declare that he was Madame Bovary; the contemporary American novelist, faced with a modern-day equivalent of such a character, announces: How wonderful it is to have nothing whatever in common with this dull and inferior person.

In your essay on the novel you too bring up Flaubert and you credit him with discovering "the terra previously incognita of the everyday." But what "hitherto unknown segment of existence" did you discover in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting? In my opinion, the answer has to be: the distinctive things Communism does to the life—most notably the spiritual or cultural life—of a society. Before reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, I thought that a novel set in Communist Czechoslovakia could "only confirm what had already been said" and what I, as a convinced anti-Communist, had already taken in. William Buckley quite reasonably asks: "How is it possible for the thousandth exposé of life under Communism to be original?" But what you proved in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (and, I have since discovered, in some of your earlier novels like The Joke as well) is that it is possible to be original even in going over the most frequently trodden ground. You cite with approval "Hermann Broch's obstinately repeated point that the only raison d'être of a novel is to discover what can only be discovered by a novel," and your own novels are a splendid demonstration of that point.

If I were still a practicing literary critic, I would be obligated at this juncture to show how The Book of Laughter and Forgetting achieves this marvelous result. To tell you the truth, though, even if I were not so rusty, I would have a hard time doing so. This is not an easy book to describe, let alone to analyze. Indeed, if I had not read it before the reviews came out, I would have been put off, and misled, by the terms in which they praised it.

Not that these terms were all inaccurate. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting assuredly is, in the words of one reviewer, "part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography"; and I also agree with the same reviewer when he adds that "the whole is genius." Yet what compelled me most when I first opened The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was not its form or its aesthetic character but its intellectual force, the astonishing intelligence controlling and suffusing every line.

The only other contemporary novelist I could think of with that kind of intellectual force, that degree of intelligence, was Saul Bellow. Like Bellow, you moved with easy freedom and complete authority through the world of ideas, and like him too you were often playful in the way you handled them. But in the end Bellow seemed always to be writing only about himself, composing endless and finally claustrophobic variations on the theme of Saul Bellow's sensibility. You too were a composer of variations; in fact, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting itself you made so bold as to inform us that "This entire book is a novel in the form of variations." Yet even though you yourself, as Milan Kundera, kept making personal appearances in the course of which you talked about your own life or, again speaking frankly in your own name, delivered yourself of brilliant little essays about the history of Czechoslovakia, or of music, or of literature, you, Milan Kundera, were not the subject of this novel, or the "theme" of these variations. The theme was totalitarianism: what it is, what it does, where it comes from. But this was a novel, however free and easy in its formal syncretism, whose mission was "to discover what can only be discovered by a novel," and consequently all its terms were specified. Totalitarianism thus meant Communism, and more specifically Soviet Communism, and still more specifically Communism as imposed on Czechoslovakia, first in 1948 by a coup and then, twenty years later in 1968, by the power of Soviet tanks …

Source: Norman Podhoretz, "An Open Letter to Milan Kundera," in Commentary, Vol. 78, No. 4, October 1984, pp. 34-39.

Ted Solotaroff

In the following excerpt from a review of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Solotaroff summarizes Kundera's political problems before his exile from Czechoslovakia and argues that in this book Kundera attempts to connect his past and his present.

How does one stay in touch with the real in a brutally absurd world? This is the question that lies between the lines of this saturnine, grief-ridden, magical book, written by a Czech dissident in exile, a satirist with a tear in his eye whose telescopic property enables him to see all the way to Prague.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting begins with a joke about repression and its double meaning. Back in 1948, party leader Gottwald made a speech to the people of Prague. It was a snowy day, he was speaking from a balcony, and one of his comrades, Clementis, gave him his fur cap. The speech proved to be historic, and a photograph featuring the two men became famous. Four years later Clementis, now foreign secretary, was hanged as a traitor and his figure was air-brushed from the photograph. Where he had stood was now a blank wall. All that remained of him was the cap on Gottwald's head.

Deep East European humor: a message flashing from Gogol to contemporary Prague—the void under the fact, the commonplace detail with a surrealist twist and a manifold meaning; a hatful of terror, oblivion, and an unruly, irrational element and its laughter that resist them. The joke is also typical Kundera—a Czech with iron in his irony who has never had to go out of his way to find his material.

A cocky, derisive, antinomian spirit from the start, Kundera was kicked out of the party in 1950, probably by a tribunal of his peers—the fate of Ludvik Jahn, the anti-hero of his first novel. Kundera describes watching his erstwhile comrades dancing in the streets of Prague, "its cafés full of poets, its jails full of traitors," on the day that Zavis Kalandra, a famous Surrealist, was executed, the smoke from the crematorium rising to "the heavens like a good omen." Excluded from "the magic circle" of the orthodox, Kundera realized that he belonged now to Kalandra, among the outsiders and the fallen. These early years of the "idyll for all," as he puts it—"timid lovers held hands on movie screens, marital infidelity received harsh penalties at citizens' courts of honor, nightingales sang, and the body of Clementis swung back and forth like a bell ringing in the new dawn of mankind"—appear to have confirmed him in his sensibility of extremes as well as in his skepticism and iconoclasm. Amid the relentless positivism and dogmatism, he held to his view of the vanity of human desires, the crossing of purposes within and between people, the child that continues to father the man. Like the cap on Gottwald's head, Kundera placed what faith he had left in the irrational, the accidental, even the perverse, which provides now and then a little space in the interstices of an authoritarian society for life and truth to break through. He wrote a lot about gratuitous acts—particularly of people jumping out of windows, morally speaking, to spite and shame their persecutors—exploring through the private life the defenestration tendencies of his so frequently conquered country, placing the compelling fantasies of his sexual marksmen alongside those of the state and its henchmen. Having ruined his life by his political "joke," Ludvik Jahn then completes his humiliation by trying to seduce the wife of his chief betrayer. In Life is Elsewhere, a Nabokovian account of the short life of a precocious literary and political opportunist that parodies the tradition of romantic poetry and politics, Jaromil Volker simultaneously achieves the zenith and nadir of his life when he informs on his girl friend and her brother. The main interest of Kundera's last novel, The Farewell Party, surrounds the impulse that prompts a dissident intellectual to allow a young nurse to poison herself accidentally.

Since neither the political nor the sexual areas of Czech life were open to this kind of inspection, Kundera went unpublished, except for the period of the Prague Spring when The Joke appeared. It made him immediately famous and two years later, his country having returned to "the warm loving embrace of the Soviet Union," it made him again a non-person. The only work he could get was writing horoscopes for a socialist youth magazine under the pseudonym of a non-existent mathematician (satire never has had to go out of its way to find Kundera); when his identity was uncovered and a young editor fell with him, he decided he was bad news for everyone and managed to leave.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is his first writing from exile. It is made up of seven narratives suspended like bridges from the two themes of its title, as though Kundera were trying to write his way across the gap between East and West, past and present, rejoining what the conditions of the cold war and of his own life have sundered. Thus the cap from Clementis's head finds a lovely parallel in a section of the final story, which describes the funeral of Victor Passer, a fellow refugee who goes on believing in his life even in its agonizing terminal stage, much as he had stubbornly clung to his vision of a new and humane politics. The funeral soon turns comic when the grave attendants miss their cue and lower the coffin into the grave, even as the speaker goes on addressing his remarks directly to the deceased. Then a gust of wind blows the hat from the head of Clevis, one of the mourners. A self-conscious, indecisive man, Clevis finally brings himself to chase down the hat, which has become the center of everyone's attention, but it continues to elude his furtive gestures and finally blows into the grave. The mourners are all racked by barely repressed laughter, particularly so when each of them must drop his shovelful of earth onto the coffin, on which sits the hat, "as though the indomitably vital and optimistic Passer were sticking his head out."

Another Czech who insists on being remembered and who illustrates the cruel, homely, perverse, and zany way things happen—the human comedy Czech style—is a dissenter named Mirek. Mirek still smarts from the realization that many years ago he took as his first mistress an ardent Stalinist who, worse yet, was ugly. It is 1971, the authorities are closing in, he has carefully kept many incriminating documents of his and his friends' activities, believing that "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against oblivion." Instead of hiding his papers, however, he races off in his car to see his Zdena and ask her to return his love letters. Mirek has some revisionism of his own in mind, and though his trip is full of Proustian slips—the memory of his willingness to bark like a dog so that she wouldn't say he made love like an intellectual, even the memory of a begonia-decked summer house that delivers the astonishing message that he once loved her, big nose and all—none of this prevents Mirek from airbrushing her out of his life, for "Mirek is as much a rewriter of history as the Communist Party, all political parties, all nations, all men … The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past."

Meanwhile, Mirek's other purpose—to pursue his fate as a soldier of memory—is going forward on its own: that is, when he arrives home the police are already going through his papers. "You don't seem to care much about your friends," one of them says. But though his son and 10 of his comrades will go to prison with him, Mirek is fulfilled.

They wanted to erase hundreds of thousands of lives from human memory and leave nothing but a single unblemished idyll. But Mirek is going to stretch out full length over their idyll, like a blemish, like the cap on Gottwald's head.

Mirek's story is clear in its meaning but enigmatic in its tone, somewhere between bemusement and derision. Though he is deeply concerned about the "struggle of memory," Kundera is generally sardonic about the dissidents who carry it on. Politics seems to have set his teeth permanently on edge. Elsewhere he distinguishes between the "demons" and the "angels"—and their respective modes of laughter, the former being generated by the irrational, incongruous, disorderly principle, the latter by the rational, harmonious, dogmatic one. He tells us that both principles are needed but since the angels are in control everywhere he looks ("they [have] taken over the left and the right, Arab and Jew, Russian general and Russian dissident") he sides with the demons of heresy rather than the angels of dogma. Which is hardly a contest for him: a subversive conservative, he identifies the demonic with the burdens of history, adulthood, memory, remorse, and love; the angelic with the innocence, indifference, present-mindedness, sensuality, and conformity of childhood …

Source: Ted Solotaroff, "A Czech Artist of Memory," in New Republic, Vol. 183, December 20, 1980, pp. 28-31.

SOURCES

Adams, Vicki, "Milan Kundera: The Search for Self in a Post-Modern World," in Imagination, Emblems and Expressions: Essays on Latin American, Caribbean, and Continental Culture and Identity, edited by Helen Ryan-Ranson, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993, pp. 233-46.

Eagleton, Terry, "Estrangement and Irony," in Salmagundi, No. 73, Winter 1987, pp. 25-32.

Faris, Wendy B., "Scheherazade's Children," in Magical Realism, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 164-90.

Gill, R. B., "Bargaining in Good Faith: The Laughter of Vonnegut, Grass, and Kundera," in Critique, Vol. 25, No. 2, Winter 1984, pp. 77-91.

Hruby, Petr, "Milan Kundera's Czech Problems," in Kosmas, Vol. 17, No. 1, Fall 2003, pp. 28-49.

Kundera, Milan, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, translated by Aaron Asher, Perennial Classics, 1996.

Misurella, Fred, "A Different World: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting," in Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs, University of South Carolina Press, 1993, pp. 19-45.

O'Brien, John, "Milan Kundera: Meaning, Play, and the Role of the Author," in Critique, Vol. 34, No. 1, Fall 1992, pp. 3-18.

Patchay, Sheena, "‘Re-Telling Histories’ in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting," in JLS/TLW, Vol. 14, No. 3-4, December 1998, pp. 245-52.

Pifer, Ellen, "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: Kundera's Narration against Narration," in the Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 22, No. 2, Spring 1992, pp. 84-96.

Ricard, François, "The Fallen Idyll: A Rereading of Milan Kundera," in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 9, No. 2, Summer 1989, p. 17-26.

Solotaroff, Ted, "A Czech Artist of Memory," in the New Republic, December 20, 1980, pp. 28-30.

Straus, Nina Pelikan, "Erasing History and Deconstructing the Text: Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting," in Critique, Vol. 28, No. 2, Winter 1987, p. 69-85.

Wilson, Jonathan, "Counterlives: On Autobiographical Fiction in the 1980s," in the Literary Review, Vol. 31, No. 4, Summer 1988, p. 393.

FURTHER READING

Banerjee, Maria Nĕmcová, Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera, Grove Press, 1990.

Banerjee devotes a chapter of this book to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Of particular interest in this book is Banerjee's discussion of using music to interpret Kundera's writing.

Kundera, Milan, The Art of the Novel, translated by Linda Asher, Grove Press, 1988.

This collection of essays by Kundera concerns the nature of fiction. The last section includes a fascinating dictionary Kundera created for the benefit of his translators.

———, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, HarperCollins, 2007.

In this book-length essay, Kundera traces the history of the novel, demonstrating that the purpose of the novel is to show readers their own lives. Students will find excellent authorial commentary on The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in this volume.

Petro, Peter, ed., Critical Essays on Milan Kundera, G.K. Hall, 1999.

This is an excellent collection of scholarly articles and interviews with Kundera that will help students develop a better understanding of his works.

Woods, Michelle, Translating Milan Kundera (Topics in Translation), Multilingual Matters, 2006.

Woods provides a fascinating look at the decision making process that goes into translating an author's work, discussing the multiple translations of Kundera's novels, and the pressure of translation on the writer.