The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Milan Kundera's 1979 novel is built out of seven thematically linked sections that the author himself called variations rather than chapters, moving between Prague after the 1968 Soviet invasion and the exile cities its emigrants settled in. In one variation a widow returns to Prague to retrieve her husband's letters and instead discovers what the regime has been quietly erasing. In another, a student sleeps with a woman she does not love as a form of political protest she cannot explain. In another, the novelist himself appears and addresses the reader directly about memory, communist airbrushing of group photographs, and the specific, private forms that forgetting takes. Written in Paris after Kundera's emigration, the book was immediately banned in Czechoslovakia and stripped him of his citizenship.
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Milan Kundera's seven linked sections move between Communist Prague and exile in France, telling stories of forgetful husbands, ostracized writers, and laughing women, all circling forgetting and political memory.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was written by Milan Kundera and originally published in French and Czech in 1979. Kundera is also the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality.
Kundera called it a novel, but it is structured as seven loosely connected parts that cross between fiction, memoir, and essay. Many readers approach it as a story collection that hangs together thematically.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is 308 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a standalone novel by Milan Kundera, not part of a series.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
