The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: A Novel

Milan Kundera

Harper Collins, Apr 7, 1999 - Fiction - 320 pages

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.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - deeEhmm - LibraryThing

Some beautiful, moving prose here, and some intense commentary pertaining to the cultural moment from which it emerged. In the end, though, I could not reconcile myself to the violence done to women ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - jonfaith - LibraryThing

My rating is questionable. I am afraid that Kundera's characters and situations have shifted into an melange of protest; one which remains indistinct in my ability to appreciate and discern.

About the author

The Franco-Czech novelist and critic Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves—all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: A Novel; Perennial Classics
• Author: Milan Kundera
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Harper Collins, 1999
• ISBN: 0060932147, 9780060932145
• Length: 320 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General; Fiction / Literary