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A review by busybeebea
The Joke by Milan Kundera
4.0
Ah! Kundera could write his shopping list in a napkin and I'd still feel amazed and overwhelmed at how beautiful his writing is and probably have it framed and put it on the wall. He touches all the soft spots in my brain, and I can't help but ask for more.
The Joke is about those tiny pieces of things that shape what you are as a person now. Everything that ever happened to you and how that affects your overall being and how sometimes you carry those pieces inside you, even after all these years, because you can't let go, or perhaps you're too afraid to let go, because they shaped you in such a way that, without it, you're not much of a person. Even if those tiny bits happened to be a mere joke.
This book was Kundera's first novel and you can feel the tiny bits of relationships being treated in such a way that it almost looks like this was a beta version of what later became The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but don't mind me, I read that one first so I'm biased.
The Joke is about those tiny pieces of things that shape what you are as a person now. Everything that ever happened to you and how that affects your overall being and how sometimes you carry those pieces inside you, even after all these years, because you can't let go, or perhaps you're too afraid to let go, because they shaped you in such a way that, without it, you're not much of a person. Even if those tiny bits happened to be a mere joke.
"(...) and I wondered, even if it were possible, even if I could erase these few wasted days from my life, what good would it do when the whole story of my life was conceived by error: the accident, the absurdity of the bad joke on the postcard? And to my horror I realized that things conceived by error were every bit as real as things conceived by reason and necessity."
This book was Kundera's first novel and you can feel the tiny bits of relationships being treated in such a way that it almost looks like this was a beta version of what later became The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but don't mind me, I read that one first so I'm biased.