The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

"An absolutely dazzling entertainment. . . . Arousing on every level—political, erotic, intellectual, and above all, humorous." — Newsweek " The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography. It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius." — New York Times Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range,  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting  is the landmark literary philosophical 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. " The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography. It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius." - New York Times "This book, as it bluntly calls itself, is brilliant and original, written with the purity and wit that invite us directly in." - John Updike "A masterpiece." - Salman Rushdie "An absolutely dazzling entertainment. . . . Arousing on every level—political, erotic, intellectual, and above all, humorous." - Newsweek 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. The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929–2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975 until his death. He is the author of the novels The Joke , Life Is Elsewhere , Farewell Waltz , The Book of Laughter and Forgetting , The Unbearable Lightness of Being , and Immortality , and the short story collection Laughable Loves —all originally in Czech. His more recent novels, Slowness , Identity , Ignorance , and The Festival of Insignificance , as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed , The Curtain , and Encounter , were originally written in French. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting A Novel By Milan Kundera HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright ©2005 Milan Kundera All right reserved. ISBN: 0060932147 Chapter One Lost Letters 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. That was a great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fateful moment of the kind that occurs only once or twice a millennium. Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close to him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald's head. The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums. Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald's head. It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. With this he is trying to justify what his friends call carelessness: meticulously keeping a diary, preserving his correspondence, compiling the minutes of all the meetings where they discuss the situation and ponder what to do. He says to them: We're not doing anything that violates the constitution. To hide and feel guilty would be the beginning of defeat. A week before, at work with his crew on the roof of a building under construction, he looked down and was overcome by vertigo. He lost his balance, and his fall was broken by a badly joined beam that came loose; then they had to extricate him from under it. At first sight, the injury seemed serious, but a little later, when it turned out to be only an ordinary fracture of the forearm, he was pleased by the prospect of some weeks of vacation and the opportunity finally to take care of things he had never found the time for. He ended up agreeing with his