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Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.… (more)
There is a shimmering brilliance in this book by Milan Kundera. The opening paragraph of the first story hooks you, and I don't want to spoil the book. From a story about life in a dictatorship to the second story detailing the strange sexual and emotional lives of people, and from there on to other stories, you are in for a treat. That is a long sentence. You enter the world of the characters in each story, and they spring to life. The writing style is deceptively simple. Don't let that fool you. There are depths, which you sense only if you are acutely aware of the people who surround you. Their language, their hypocrisy, their clothing, their society, their anxieties. The stories are short, and each is complete in itself. ( )
Kundera knew how to write. (I speak in the past tense because he is now 90 years old and I wonder how much writing he's doing nowadays.) But he chose to write about things I find it very hard to care about. In this, more than in Unbearable Lightness, he glorifies sex frequently as a rite of passage, and goes on at great length about its incredible significance. The characters are all so literary. So avant-garde, and in this day and age, cliched. There is a lot of political drama too. But hasn't everything in the book been done before, and done by Kundera specifically? Yes, the characters were witty, but that was about the extent of their depth in my opinion.
I understand if you enjoy his polished sentences and pithy remarks. There's satire and humor and possibly some heart. I won't argue with you about his skill. But I'm usually looking for a different brand of literature. ( )
In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square.
Quotations
"The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allow no voice to filter through from outside."
The first time an angel heard the devil’s laughter, he was dumbfounded. That happened at a feast in a crowded room, where the devil’s laughter, which is terribly contagious, spread from one person to another. The angel clearly understood that such laughter was directed against God and against the dignity of His works. He knew that he must react swiftly somehow, but felt weak and defenseless. Unable to come up with anything of his own, he aped adversary. Opening his mouth, he emitted broken, spasmodic sounds in the higher reaches of his vocal range (a bit like the sound made on the street of a seaside town by Michelle and Gabrielle), but giving them an opposite meaning: whereas the devil’s laughter denoted the absurdity of things, the angel on the contrary meant to rejoice over how well ordered, wisely conceived, good and meaningful everything here below was.
The angel and the devil faced each other and, mouths wide open, emitted nearly the same sounds, but each one’s noises expressed the absolute opposite of the other’s. And seeing the angel laugh, the devil laughed all the more, all the harder, and all the more blatantly, because the laughing angel was infinitely comical.
Laughable laughter is disastrous. Even so, the angels have gained something from it. They have tricked us with a semantic imposture. Their imitation of laughter and (the devil’s) original laughter are both called by the same name. Nowadays, we don’t even realize that the same external display serves two absolutely opposed internal attitude. There are two laughters, and we have no word to tell one from the other.
It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, conviction, faith, history. Human life --- and herein lies its secret --- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.
We are living in the great historical era when physical love will be once and for all transformed into ridiculous motions.
People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end and that behind all the joyous "onward and upward" slogans lurks the lascivious voice of death urging us to make haste.
The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.
Last words
The man spoke, all the others listened with interest, and their bare genitals stared stupidly and sadly at the yellow sand.
Please note: Michael Henry Heim translated the 1st English-language version (1980) from Czech; and Aaron Asher translated the 2nd English-language version (1996) from the revised French version (1985).
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
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That is a long sentence.
You enter the world of the characters in each story, and they spring to life. The writing style is deceptively simple. Don't let that fool you.
There are depths, which you sense only if you are acutely aware of the people who surround you. Their language, their hypocrisy, their clothing, their society, their anxieties.
The stories are short, and each is complete in itself. (