The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: Revised Edition - Softcover

Kundera, Milan

  • 3.95 out of 5 stars
    53,752 ratings by Goodreads
 
9780140096934: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: Revised Edition

Synopsis

Offers a blend of stories, anecdotes, political history, and autobiography to create variations on several themes, including the power of laughter and the danger of forgetting

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of 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 title" may belong to another edition of this title.