The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

First published:Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli, 1979 (English translation, 1980)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Political and psychological realism

Time of plot: 1948-1980

Locale: Czechoslovakia and France

Principal characters

• Mirek, a political dissident
• Zdena, his onetime mistress
• Marketa, a young woman
• Karel, her husband
• Eva, Marketa and Karel’s lover
• Mother, Karel’s mother
• Gabrielle, an American schoolgirl
• Michelle, an American schoolgirl
• Madame Raphael, their teacher
• R., an editor
• Milan Kundera, the author
• Tamina, a Czech defector
• Bibi, her friend
• Hugo, a writer
• Kristyna, a provincial woman
• The Student, her boyfriend
• Kundera’s father, who loses his ability to speak as he slowly dies
• Jan, a doctor
• Edwige, his lover
• Passer, Jan’s dying friend

The Story:

Lost Letters. Disregarding his friends’ advice to destroy his diaries recording dissident political meetings, Mirek travels by car to meet Zdena. She is ugly, so he is ashamed that he had an affair with her twenty-five years earlier. He realizes that he is being followed by another car, most likely the secret police. Mirek asks Zdena to return his old love letters to him. She refuses. On the way back to his apartment, Mirek manages to elude the car following him. When he arrives home, he finds his apartment being searched by the police, who confiscate his diaries. Mirek is arrested and sentenced to jail for six years.

Mother. Marketa and her husband Karel ask his aging, nearly sightless mother to stay with them for a week. Mother refuses to leave on the day planned, insisting on staying another day. Eva arrives to stay with them that night, and Mother is told that Eva is Marketa’s cousin. Marketa accuses Karel of infidelity, and they begin to fight, but Eva intervenes and smooths things over. As Mother is telling Karel that Eva reminds him of one of her old friends, Eva and Marketa emerge from their bath half-naked. After Mother retires for the evening, the three sleep together. Karel, thinking himself a superb tactician for having arranged the ménage à trois, calls himself Bobby Fisher, after the chess master. In truth, his wife arranged that they sleep with his lover. The next morning at the train station, Karel invites his mother to move in with them, but she refuses.

The Angels. Gabrielle and Michelle discuss the play Rhinocéros, 1959 (English translation, 1959) by Eugène Ionesco, with Madame Raphael. The author, Milan Kundera, recalls that, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he lost his job and wrote under a pseudonym for a living. R., the editor of the magazine for whom Kundera wrote an astrology column, illegally covered up the fact that he was the author. Her boss requested that the “astrologer” write a personal astrological reading for him. Kundera, as a prank, predicted an awful future for the boss. Kundera then recalls that, in 1950, the French writer Paul Éluard, to show his solidarity to the communist movement, did not protest the unjust death sentence of his friend, the Czech artist Zavis Kalandra. Kundera imagined Éluard rising in the air while dancing with other communists. R. sent a letter to Kundera, informing him that it had been discovered that he was the author of the column. Kundera met with R., who had been fired from her job and was going to be interrogated by the police. After their class presentation on Rhinocéros is ridiculed by their classmates, Gabrielle and Michelle ascend through the ceiling with Madame Raphael.

Lost Letters. Tamina and her husband defect from Czechoslovakia but leave behind their notebooks and letters to each other. Tamina’s husband falls ill while abroad and dies. She wants to retrieve the notebooks to help preserve her memories of her husband and their life together. Bibi agrees to get the notebooks on her trip to Prague, but Bibi then cancels her trip. Tamina’s brother, who still lives in Prague, is persuaded to get the notebooks, which her in-laws opened and read. Tamina has sex with Hugo, in part because he offers to travel to Prague to bring the notebooks back. While they make love, Tamina tries to remember her husband’s image. After Hugo refuses to go to Czechoslovakia, Tamina resolves to forget her memories.

Litost. Kristyna travels to Prague from the countryside to see the student, who is embarrassed over her provincial dress and manners. Though invited to an important gathering of famous writers, the student declines so that he can be with Kristyna. She persuades him to attend, requesting that a famous poet sign his book for her. At the gathering, the student witnesses the drunken carousing of the poets, and the famous poet writes a personal message in his book for Kristyna. Upon his return, she refuses to have sex with him, ashamed to tell him directly that another pregnancy could kill her. The student interprets her vaguely worded excuse to mean that she will die from love. He finds this message inspiring. The next morning, she explains more fully, and he is dejected once he realizes his self-deception.

The Angels. Kundera’s father, slowly dying, gradually loses the power of speech. Kundera recalls speaking with his father about his ideas on Ludwig van Beethoven’s sonatas, which prompts Kundera’s comments on the writing of the novel in terms of musical structure. Tamina is taken to an island inhabited only by children. She plays their games, but the children physically and sexually abuse her. She attempts to escape, but they capture her. Attempting to escape a second time, she swims into the water and drowns.

The Border. Jan reflects on his erotic life with Edwige, which loses meaning for him. Jan visits his dying friend Passer at a sanatorium, where they discuss their different views of the meaning of life. At Passer’s funeral, the wind blows a mourner’s hat into the open grave. As the mourners shovel some dirt into the pit and onto the hat, they struggle to restrain their inappropriate laughter. Afterward, at a group orgy, Jan is struck at the ridiculousness of the scene and is asked to leave when he laughs out loud. At a nude beach, Jan and Edwige discuss but misunderstand each other’s interpretations of the myth of Daphnis and Chloë.

Bibliography

Banerjee, Maria Nemcova. Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. Thorough summary and discussion of the major themes of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Milan Kundera. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. Collection of essays, including discussions of Kundera’s use of sexuality, estrangement, and irony in his work, Kundera and kitsch, and “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: Kundera’s Narration Against Narration” by Ellen Pifer. Pearl K. Bell’s essay, “The Real Avant-Garde,” places Kundera in a tradition of dissident Eastern European writing and praises the originality of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

Frank, Søren. Migration and Literature: Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and Jan Kjærstad. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Examines works by Kundera and three other authors, focusing on the theme of migration and the various strategies they use to describe the experience of exile and homelessness.

Miletic, Tijana. European Literary Immigration into the French Language: Readings of Gary, Kristof, Kundera, and Semprun. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Kundera, Romain Gary, Agota Kristof, and Jorge Semprun are twentieth century writers whose native language was not French, but who chose to write in this language. Applies linguistic, sociological, and psychoanalytic analyses to examine the common elements in their work.

Misurella, Fred. Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Good discussion of the novel in the wider contexts of Kundera’s thought, life, and career.

Petro, Peter, ed. Critical Essays on Milan Kundera. New York: G. K. Hall, 1999. Includes reviews of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by novelist John Updike and Maria Nemcova Banerjee, several interviews with Kundera, and essays, including discussions of Kundera’s Central Europe, the use of commedia dell’arte style in his novels, the slow pace of his novels, and “Genre and Paradigm in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” by Herbert Eagle. David Lodge’s essay, “Milan Kundera, and the Idea of the Author in Modern Criticism,” compares the narrative technique of Kundera’s first novel, The Joke (1967), to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, calling the latter “a masterpiece of postmodernist fiction.”

Updike, John. “Czech Angels.” In Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. An often-cited enthusiastic review/essay that focuses on the themes of forgetting and eroticism in the novel.