[Abnorttrano]

Why The Book of Laughter and Forgetting?

Because laughter can be a key to understand an absurd world. Because, as Kundera writes, the struggle of Man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Because the author lived in a country where laughing could be a crime and men could easily be erased from history books.

I wouldn?t know how to define this book: a collection of novellas; ruminations on Prague during the Soviet regime; the memoirs of one Milan Kundera; an essay on history; metafiction; or just smut.

The Soviet specter in the former Czechoslovakia dominates some of the book?s narratives: here we meet a man who struggles against the inevitability being crushed by a regime he loathes; a woman who flees the Soviet bloc and realizes it?s too late to ever get her former life back. But it?s also a book about mothers, and poets, and college students studying Ionesco, and untranslatable Czech words, and disturbing children in a mysterious island, and copious amounts of sex.

I would compare Kundera?s style to Jos? Saramago?s. It?s a traditional prose style, but interweaving the fictional narratives with playful asides and philosophical dissertations. Sometimes the narrator intrudes on the narrative to disagree with what his characters are thinking, saying or doing. Sometimes he even admits they?re just fictional characters anyway. And once in a while the narrator, who?s probably Kundera, entertains us with some anecdotes about his years in Prague, when he was a blacklisted writer unable to get a job.

After the uneventful Identity I returned to Kundera to discover one of the best books I?ve read this year so far. Reading this book should be a joy for anyone who likes humor, sex, politics and the art of fiction.