The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Softcover

Kundera, Milan; Kundera, Milan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006099701X ISBN 13: 9780060997014

Publisher: Perennial, 1994

Synopsis

A vivid mix of fictional autobiography and myth examines the human condition through five uniquely integrated parts, humorously and movingly depicting the political, erotic, and intellectual facets of modern life. Reissue. NYT.

About this title

Review:

In one of the finer modern ironies of the life-imitates-art sort, the country that Kundera seemed to be writing about when he talked about Czechoslovakia is, thanks to the latest political redefinitions, no longer precisely there. This kind of disappearance and reappearance is, partly, what Kundera explores in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In this polymorphous work -- now a novel, now autobiography, now a philosophical treatise -- Kundera discusses life, music, sex, philosophy, literature and politics in ways that are rarely politically correct, never classifiable but always original, entertaining and definitely brilliant.

About the Author:

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, for more than twenty years.

He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, The Farewell Party, The Books of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves all originally written in Czech.

Like Slowness, his two earlier nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.

About this edition

• Publisher: Perennial
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 006099701X
• ISBN 13: 9780060997014
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312