The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - By: Milan Kundera

I was told by a friend that Milan Kundera's books offer a very nice and interesting insight to the view of many of the people in the late communist era in Eastern Europe. This book in particular ( next to his very famous 'the unbearable lightness of being' ) looked very tempting to read..

The book is a series of short stories, very strongly connected by the themes of laughter and forgetting. Laughter is a deep value and a goal by itself.. Pure laughter.. the laughter that is originally diabolic.. But is very human and is somehow opposed to structure and organization; this is why the angels couldn’t really master it. This any structure is common in the stories touching Prague’s political conditions in the period around 'the spring'.

The writer through many of the situations and characters displays the value of laughing.. and discusses forgetting .. letting go, and allowing the past to be unconsciously integrated into the bigger flow of life, or else defying forgetting. Kundera Beautifully passes by the theme of the inability to reach the idealistic goals that the revolution is based upon, leading to its reduction into a bureaucratic body of deceit and forgetting ( in its negative form, and this is why the protagonist in one of the stories decides to live .. to remain a mark and defy forgetting ! )

Simplicity, belonging, youth, love, sex, dreams, memories, moving on, worries and hopes and more .. this book is a very emotional one, yet it doesn’t lack architectural genius and beauty of structure ( even though rigid structure in its systematic communist form is shown as opposing to the true nature of the people and detached from them).

Beautiful!