The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Review

The novel’s famous opening is also its thesis statement. Klement Gottwald stands on a balcony in Prague in February 1948, delivering a speech while Clementis, a fellow Communist official, stands beside him and puts his fur hat on Gottwald’s bare head. The photograph is taken. Four years later, Clementis is charged with treason and hanged. The Party erases him from the photograph — but the hat remains. Forgetting is never quite total.

This incident — real, historical, reported by Kundera with a precision that fiction rarely permits itself — frames seven sections that are only loosely connected by character or plot, and are bound instead by theme: the political and personal dimensions of memory and forgetting, the two kinds of laughter, the relationship between the living and the dead. The sections include a meeting between Kundera’s father and a young woman who has forgotten everything, a story of Tamina trying to recover letters she left behind in Prague, meditations on music theory, an erotic comedy, a dream sequence involving dead writers. The form is a meditation, not a novel — or rather, it is a novel that has been persuaded by its own argument to abandon the conventional forms of continuity that make narrative possible.

Kundera distinguishes two kinds of laughter that become central to the book’s argument. The devil’s laughter delights in disorder, in the refusal of meaning — it is the laughter that comes from recognizing that nothing holds together. The angel’s laughter insists that everything makes sense, that the world is as it should be. Both, Kundera argues, are dangerous: the devil’s laughter because it disables moral response, the angel’s because it is indistinguishable from the laughter of those who collaborate with evil while maintaining their innocence. The totalitarian state, in this analysis, is a permanent production of angelic laughter.

The most moving sections concern Tamina, a Czech émigré in Western Europe whose husband has died and who is losing her memories of him because the notebooks in which she recorded them are locked in an apartment in Prague she can never return to. Tamina’s effort to recover the notebooks — to reclaim the past the regime indirectly controls by controlling her access to it — is the book’s emotional centre. In Tamina, Kundera makes personal and political forgetting the same thing: the regime’s theft of history and the private loss of a loved face are part of the same erasure.

Memory as Resistance

The political argument of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is most concentrated in the Tamina sections, but it runs through the novel’s entire architecture. Kundera was writing in French exile after the normalisation that followed the 1968 invasion — a period when the Czechoslovak regime was engaged in a systematic effort to rewrite its own history, rehabilitating some figures and erasing others, requiring citizens to perform allegiance to a revised account of events they had lived through. Forgetting was not merely a private failure but a political obligation.

The hat that remains in the official photograph after Clementis has been erased is both an emblem and an argument. Erasure is never complete. History has a residue. The regime’s power over memory is real but not total — somewhere the original photographs survive, in private archives, in diaries, in the minds of people who were there. Kundera was himself one of those resistances: his novel is an act of counter-memory, insisting on the complexity of what actually happened against the simplifications of both official history and comfortable forgetting.

Music and the Novel

Kundera’s interest in musical form is not decorative. He studied musicology and the novel’s structure — seven parts, each with a distinct texture and mode, returning to common themes in different keys — is a genuine attempt to bring the contrapuntal logic of music to the novel form. The passages on music theory and on the relationship between variation and theme are not digressions; they are the novel’s formal argument made explicit.

The novel was written between 1976 and 1978, during Kundera’s French exile, and it represents the first full flowering of the form he had been developing since The Joke: the essay-novel, the meditation that is also narrative, the fiction that thinks aloud about its own construction. It was published first in French translation in 1979 and in Czech the following year, in samizdat, circulating in Prague in typescript copies.

Exile as Condition

The experience of exile runs through the novel’s texture in ways that are not always explicit. Kundera’s position — living in Paris, writing about Czechoslovakia in a language that is not Czech, unable to return — shapes the novel’s preoccupation with memory and its loss. The Tamina sections are partly self-portrait: the émigré who cannot recover the specific materials of a past life, whose memories are fading because they have nothing to rest on, who is losing the dead because the means of preserving them are locked behind a border that cannot be crossed.

For readers approaching Milan Kundera for the first time, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is both a challenge and a revelation: a book that refuses the conventional shape of the novel — it is closer to a set of variations, mixing story, memoir, and philosophical essay — yet coheres around its central obsessions of memory, laughter, power, and loss. It is best read slowly and more than once, allowing its recurring themes to accumulate meaning across its seven parts. For readers willing to abandon the expectation of a single plot, it offers some of the most intellectually exhilarating prose in twentieth-century European fiction, and an essential statement of why Kundera matters.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Kundera’s most structurally audacious work, and the one that most directly argues what all his novels demonstrate: that the fight against forgetting is the fight for the self.