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sidharthvardhan's review against another edition
4.0
“...because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.”
This won’t be the Kundera book I would recommend to a reader new to him. Not that it is bad – it still has all the interesting psychology (he dislikes the word), philosophy (he dislikes that too) and sex (… Well, he is a man.); the trouble with this book is it is too much into Kunderism. The good thing about him is he never beats around the bush. It is as if he knows what he has show and only tells parts of the story that say it – thus there is only vague suggestions regarding what happened during the time between events focused on in consecutive chapters. I don’t mind it if anything I actually prefer it over novels filled with useless details just there to establish connections in events and characters. (And while we are talking about his art, there is, of course, his nosy presence as writer of novel – telling you stories from his real life as well as that modern omniscient* narrator thing who only sees his character doing things but has no idea about their motivations – and is thus always making guesses (thus also the asterisk on omniscient).
But this time there is not only any unity of action but no unity of plot, This book is nearer to a collection of short stories rather than a single novel, stories that often aren’t connected in any way other than the common themes of laughter and/or forgetting. And Kundera is aware of this and says it is intentional. This is where the interview, in the end, comes handy. He defines novel as
“A novel is a long piece of synthetic prose based on play with invented characters. These are the only limits. By the term synthetic I have in mind the novelist's desire to grasp his subject from all sides and in the fullest possible completeness. Ironic essay, novelistic narrative, autobiographical fragment, historic fact, flight of fantasy: The synthetic power of the novel is capable of combining everything into a unified whole like the voices of polyphonic music. The unity of a book need not stem from the plot, but can be provided by the theme. “
The two themes here are laughter and forgetting. Forgetting makes obvious sense as he had to deal with communism:
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
The quote would make obvious sense to anyone who has read 1984 or know about historical revisionism. There are of course the aspects of the theme as felt by people too. How it light to be without the burden of past memories; how one wishes to retain happy memories of past and how difficult it is.
“Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.”
“We will never remember anything by sitting in one place waiting for the memories to come back to us of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the world. We must travel if we want to find them and flush them from their hiding places!”
“The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past.”
As to laughter, it is of two kinds – the one of the devil and one of angels:
“Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated. Angels are partisans not of Good, but of divine creation. The Devil, on the other hand, denies all rational meaning to God's world. ' World domination, as everyone knows, is divided between demons and angels. But the good of the world does not require the latter to gain precedence over the former (as I thought when I was young); all it needs is a certain equilibrium of power. If there is too much uncontested meaning on earth (the reign of the angels), man collapses under the burden; if the world loses all its meaning (the reign of the
demons), life is every bit as impossible.”
Now Russian revolution and communism are angels on their way to make the world; a paradise (a place of too much uncontested meaning) and so not a very nice thing – however this paradise is tempting to people, who much like angels, want to live in a fully meaningful world. That is why communists don’t like art – art is all about raising questions:
“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties, the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.”
“The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.”
So all artist are devil’s advocates. But there can be too much of that too.
Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for anage of universal deafness and lack of understanding.
“It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.”
The island of children is lot like communist paradise – full of children with no memories. The children there are realistic - true little angels (as per Kundera’s definition above) and not innocent version from a TVC.
cgdppl's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
"The book of laughter and forgetting" is visibly a for of a novel which to some extent was refined and mastered with "Unbearable lightness of being". Some themes and even characters seem repeated and developed with to the best degree in the second book. On the other hand it is not just an inferior version of it, it defiently uses the same style of narration and world building but leaves some space for philospical disscussion about different topics, still circling around the events of Prague spring
michinio's review against another edition
3.0
ამ წიგნში იყო მომენტები, როცა ჩანდა მაგარი მწერალი, მაგრამ ასეთი მომენტები იყო ცოტა. არ ვიცი თვითონ რისი თქმა უნდოდა, მაგრამ მე გავიგე: "მაშინაც კი როცა რუსული ტანკები იპყრობს ჩემს ქვეყანას, ჩეხები მაინც სულ სექსზე ვფიქრობთ". ხოდა რავი აბა...
შეიძლება კუნდერას პირველ წიგნად ეს არ უნდა წამეკითხა, მარა ასე გამოვიდა და ჰა.
შეიძლება კუნდერას პირველ წიგნად ეს არ უნდა წამეკითხა, მარა ასე გამოვიდა და ჰა.
isaacbud's review against another edition
dark
emotional
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
dshowstack's review against another edition
dark
funny
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
jvaneck's review against another edition
funny
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
novabird's review against another edition
5.0
A slight touch of glorious nausea, a bit of a sweet headache, and a good and strange affliction, are some of the side effects I had while reading Kundera. This is when I knew I was pushing against the borders of my mind. So after I quelled my side effects, I kept on and discovered that I was starting to get what he was so doggedly trying to convey without sounding too much like Diogenes – being cynical.
In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera as one of the masters in literature is one who understood both language’s powers and limitations, and equally understands humankind. Kundera writes with a light and playful hand about weightier, more serious philosophical issues. He gives us subtle hints and broad signposts to help in the interpretation of his text and texts to follow.
Kundera gives us ways to think about each seven separate stories as part of a bigger whole by looking at his choice of content. Here are just some of the most obvious examples to me:
1.) Against the canvas of struggle of man against power, “The first step to liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.” is painted Kundera’s depiction of how personal memory struggles against forgetting. From Lost Letters Parts One and Two, and The Angels Part Two; the focus is on the retrieval of lost love letters, both end up in a loss of the memories and move towards death. “…if the shaky structure of her memories collapses … all Tamina will have left is the present, that invisible point, that nothing moving slowly towards death.” That loss of memory equals death.
2.) In Mother and The Border different versions of the idyll are shown. In Mother memory is seen as a process that moves from the patriotic, to familial, to erotic, where the latter is placed in an idyllic setting. In The Border, Kundera deliberately focuses on the present and pushes both the borders of public display of death, ending with the Devil’s laughter, and the public display of sexuality, ending in the angelic idyll of the rational mind completely dominating sexuality.
3.) TBOLAF begins with the delusional idea that Mirek can discount the idyll of the state by becoming a blemish on the idyll, an intrusion into their concept of perfection. TBOLAF ends with Jan transmuting an idyllic past for an idyllic present, submitting to the present, into an idyll state of being where privacy has been sacrificed to the rational.
4.) A definition of Litost is a synthesis of the following emotional states: grief, sympathy, remorse, undefinable longing, resentment, bitterness, and need for revenge, all together they combine into litost, which is characteristic of immaturity. Most of the stories have a gravitas of litost, when it is absent, what replaces it is laughter of angels “into the void of a world resounding with the terrifying laughter of the angels that covers my every word with its din.”
5.) A different interpretation of what is good and bad (angelic or from the Devil) is offered by Kundera. This other perspective helps the reader to orient their own value system within the alienated landscape of which modern humankind lives. This landscape of alienation has as its destination a distorted sense of the idyllic and a sense of being unbound from memory, because, “man cannot conceive of the end of space or time, of history or a nation; he lives in an illusory infinity.”
6.) Kundera uses the concept of borders.
Kundera clearly says that borders are not points in individual history, but are universally shared and individually experienced, what I would call ‘reality checks’ as we see them more or less clearly given external circumstances and they are always omnipresent. In other words, it is in our ability to push ourselves to the edges of our reality, and catch a glimmer of another person’s, people’s reality, by which we can get a bit of a sense of their reality and history.
Jan doesn't quite get to the source of his strange feeling of affliction.
Kundera also has us look at the form he uses:
Kundera incorporates commentary on his own narrative style, by having Tamina at the very last second awaken from her sleep state and think that the young man “was wrong to tell her that her grief was all form and no content.”
“Literature as a system of signs.” p. 55 Kundera very directly indicates when he is pointing to literature as a system of signs when he uses his authorial voice and says, “By the way, it is not the least bit accidental that the name of the young man sitting at the wheel is Raphael.” (as an angel of death in this case). Neither was it coincidental that he gives the teacher, in Angels Part One, the name Madam Raphael. Not only do we get an echo effect with the two Raphaels, but we also get to look at different aspects of forced or obedient laughter.
Unlike the angels playing a semantic hoax by attributing their laughter as the same as the original and thus combining the two meanings, Kundera does a superb job of delineating differences by creating multidimensional characters and giving us variations of perspective with which to view them.
He uses this delineation effect as he creates parallel stories, repetitions and creates multiple perspectives on motifs running throughout his work. One motif is the sexual indifference expressed throughout the novel through various women at first, ending with both men and women in the end. Kundera also has Karel think the opposite of what the women experienced, “The rest (of his sexual encounters) were mere echoes, imitations, repetitions or reminiscences.” Karel places his reconstructed memory of a childhood sexual experience in the landscape of the absurdly idyllic.
Kundera also sets the stage for, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” with the Angel Raphael saying to Tamina,
Overall, Kundera gives us a somewhat nightmarish philosophically driven theme of the necessity and weight of both history and memory. We need both history and memory to help us recognize the borders of our shared humanity:
With brilliant insight, Kundera posits differing ideas and poses them against each other to achieve maximum effect. The public and the private, the latter of which he says is sacred. Innocence against cynicism, as children undulating. Indifference against passion, both political and personal. The idyll versus litost. The body opposite the mind/world/ideology. Angels versus the Devil. Laughter and Forgetting etc. Ultimately, Kundera provides us with few definitive, singular right/wrong answers but uses Socratic Method to ask questions. Kundera does this to get us thinking not about the answers, but about how we construct our questions, our world, and ourselves, basically our reality.
You can read Kundera’s novels as lightly or as heavily as you want to; it all depends on your perspective and/or taste. Some, not all, get a sense of satisfaction after having read his works.
As for me, the sense that I get is of wanting to keep my satisfying side effect of a, ‘good and strange affliction.’ I have memories of my good and strange afflictions over time, and I can think of another word for it now; empathy.
What remains with me as a question is how Tamina offered hope with her, "grief is not all form but content too," in her last insight. An insight should come with a better conclusion than what Kundera provided for Tamina as the vessel of existing for nothing but body and life alone. To me this is the essence of cynicism and existentialism.
In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera as one of the masters in literature is one who understood both language’s powers and limitations, and equally understands humankind. Kundera writes with a light and playful hand about weightier, more serious philosophical issues. He gives us subtle hints and broad signposts to help in the interpretation of his text and texts to follow.
Kundera gives us ways to think about each seven separate stories as part of a bigger whole by looking at his choice of content. Here are just some of the most obvious examples to me:
1.) Against the canvas of struggle of man against power, “The first step to liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.” is painted Kundera’s depiction of how personal memory struggles against forgetting. From Lost Letters Parts One and Two, and The Angels Part Two; the focus is on the retrieval of lost love letters, both end up in a loss of the memories and move towards death. “…if the shaky structure of her memories collapses … all Tamina will have left is the present, that invisible point, that nothing moving slowly towards death.” That loss of memory equals death.
2.) In Mother and The Border different versions of the idyll are shown. In Mother memory is seen as a process that moves from the patriotic, to familial, to erotic, where the latter is placed in an idyllic setting. In The Border, Kundera deliberately focuses on the present and pushes both the borders of public display of death, ending with the Devil’s laughter, and the public display of sexuality, ending in the angelic idyll of the rational mind completely dominating sexuality.
3.) TBOLAF begins with the delusional idea that Mirek can discount the idyll of the state by becoming a blemish on the idyll, an intrusion into their concept of perfection. TBOLAF ends with Jan transmuting an idyllic past for an idyllic present, submitting to the present, into an idyll state of being where privacy has been sacrificed to the rational.
4.) A definition of Litost is a synthesis of the following emotional states: grief, sympathy, remorse, undefinable longing, resentment, bitterness, and need for revenge, all together they combine into litost, which is characteristic of immaturity. Most of the stories have a gravitas of litost, when it is absent, what replaces it is laughter of angels “into the void of a world resounding with the terrifying laughter of the angels that covers my every word with its din.”
5.) A different interpretation of what is good and bad (angelic or from the Devil) is offered by Kundera. This other perspective helps the reader to orient their own value system within the alienated landscape of which modern humankind lives. This landscape of alienation has as its destination a distorted sense of the idyllic and a sense of being unbound from memory, because, “man cannot conceive of the end of space or time, of history or a nation; he lives in an illusory infinity.”
6.) Kundera uses the concept of borders.
“The border is not a product of repetition. Repetition is only a means of making the border visible. The line of the border is covered with dust, and repetition is like the whisk of a hand removing the dust.”
Kundera clearly says that borders are not points in individual history, but are universally shared and individually experienced, what I would call ‘reality checks’ as we see them more or less clearly given external circumstances and they are always omnipresent. In other words, it is in our ability to push ourselves to the edges of our reality, and catch a glimmer of another person’s, people’s reality, by which we can get a bit of a sense of their reality and history.
“And once again he was overwhelmed by the vague and mysterious idea of the border. Suddenly he felt he was at the line, crossing it. He was overwhelmed by a strange feeling of affliction, and from the haze of that affliction came an even stranger thought that the Jews had filed into Hitler’s gas chambers naked and en masse. He couldn’t quite understand why that image was coming back to him or what it was trying to tell him. Perhaps that the Jews had also been on the other side of the border and that nudity is the uniform on the other side. That nudity is a shroud.”
Jan doesn't quite get to the source of his strange feeling of affliction.
Kundera also has us look at the form he uses:
Kundera incorporates commentary on his own narrative style, by having Tamina at the very last second awaken from her sleep state and think that the young man “was wrong to tell her that her grief was all form and no content.”
“Literature as a system of signs.” p. 55 Kundera very directly indicates when he is pointing to literature as a system of signs when he uses his authorial voice and says, “By the way, it is not the least bit accidental that the name of the young man sitting at the wheel is Raphael.” (as an angel of death in this case). Neither was it coincidental that he gives the teacher, in Angels Part One, the name Madam Raphael. Not only do we get an echo effect with the two Raphaels, but we also get to look at different aspects of forced or obedient laughter.
Unlike the angels playing a semantic hoax by attributing their laughter as the same as the original and thus combining the two meanings, Kundera does a superb job of delineating differences by creating multidimensional characters and giving us variations of perspective with which to view them.
He uses this delineation effect as he creates parallel stories, repetitions and creates multiple perspectives on motifs running throughout his work. One motif is the sexual indifference expressed throughout the novel through various women at first, ending with both men and women in the end. Kundera also has Karel think the opposite of what the women experienced, “The rest (of his sexual encounters) were mere echoes, imitations, repetitions or reminiscences.” Karel places his reconstructed memory of a childhood sexual experience in the landscape of the absurdly idyllic.
Kundera also sets the stage for, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” with the Angel Raphael saying to Tamina,
“How about a place where thing are as light as the breeze, where things have no weight, where there is no remorse . . .. and she answers, “Yes, a place where things weigh nothing at all.”
Overall, Kundera gives us a somewhat nightmarish philosophically driven theme of the necessity and weight of both history and memory. We need both history and memory to help us recognize the borders of our shared humanity:
“But I feel Jan is wrong in thinking that the border is a line dissecting man’s life at a given point, that it marks a turning point in time, a definite second on the clock of human existence. No. In fact, I am certain the border is constantly with us, irrespective of time or our age; external circumstances may make it either more or less visible, but it is omnipresent.”
With brilliant insight, Kundera posits differing ideas and poses them against each other to achieve maximum effect. The public and the private, the latter of which he says is sacred. Innocence against cynicism, as children undulating. Indifference against passion, both political and personal. The idyll versus litost. The body opposite the mind/world/ideology. Angels versus the Devil. Laughter and Forgetting etc. Ultimately, Kundera provides us with few definitive, singular right/wrong answers but uses Socratic Method to ask questions. Kundera does this to get us thinking not about the answers, but about how we construct our questions, our world, and ourselves, basically our reality.
You can read Kundera’s novels as lightly or as heavily as you want to; it all depends on your perspective and/or taste. Some, not all, get a sense of satisfaction after having read his works.
As for me, the sense that I get is of wanting to keep my satisfying side effect of a, ‘good and strange affliction.’ I have memories of my good and strange afflictions over time, and I can think of another word for it now; empathy.
What remains with me as a question is how Tamina offered hope with her, "grief is not all form but content too," in her last insight. An insight should come with a better conclusion than what Kundera provided for Tamina as the vessel of existing for nothing but body and life alone. To me this is the essence of cynicism and existentialism.
eddie_burgess's review against another edition
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
On the whole I really loved it. Kundera’s writing blew me away on multiple occasions, I feel like he is endlessly quotable and just a beautiful writer. Some of the themes were great, in particular the conversations around memory, the political history of czechoslovakia, laughter etc. Furthermore the unique style of the book (7 linked short stories which often become switch between fiction and autobiographical) was really compelling and enjoyable to read. I found the story of Tamina most compelling even if it’s really sad and pretty grim, however the ideas around memory were so amazing. The section titled ‘litost’ was also great too. Kundera has a lot of really interesting points and things to say about humanity. I think it’s definitely one to reread in the future to get the most out of it. However, it must be said I did not agree with everything Kundera says and there were certain points when, whether intentional or not, the plots of these interweaving short stories started to veer off into the uncomfortable. Whether this is purposeful or not I’m yet to decide. Overall however, the writing, themes and unique style of novel really made me enjoy it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content