The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

I love Milan Kundera, and I haven’t read one of his books for a while – so it was nice to revisit his writing on my recent holiday. I’ve still not read his most famous novel (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), but have read Immortality, Identity, The Joke, and The Festival of Insignificance – which is both the order I read them in and how much I liked them. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) is one of the best Kundera novels I’ve read – in a translation by Aaron Asher. And translations really matter with Kundera – he is notoriously choosy, but approved of this one. Which, interestingly enough, was translated from the French translations of the original Czech. An earlier English translation – in 1980, directly from the Czech – obviously didn’t quite cut it.

That sort of patchwork is quite appropriate for a book like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which I hesitate to call a novel or a collection of short stories – it is something in between. It is, indeed, a book of laughter and forgetting – themes which haunt the book like characters, offering the only unity available. And why (Kundera seems to ask) should not themes be a book’s unifying thread, rather than characters, time, and place?

Structurally, the book is divided into seven sections. To emphasis the iteration of thoughts and cross-connections, two are called ‘Lost Letters’ and two are called ‘The Angels’. It’s probably best (if you want a full summary) to head over to the Wikipedia page, rather than me paraphrasing what they say. But each section looks at a slice of life in various Czech people’s lives – from a man travelling and being followed by suspicious government agents, while thinking of his past love, to a fanciful scene in which schoolgirls fly away with angels. Most are connected with sex or politics, or both – which are often the two keynotes of Kundera’s created worlds.

But sections are not simple, discrete tales. Within each, Kundera shifts from image to image, thought to thought – in the first, for instance, he includes a description of a 1948 photograph of Vladimir Clementis and Klement Gottwald, from which Clementis was erased when he was no longer acceptable to the politicians’ propaganda. This is one of the senses of forgetting in the book. He also includes himself – or, at least, an author called Milan Kundera – and each section incorporates tangents, anecdotes, fables, parables. There is a section held together by the concept of litost – a Czech word without direct translation, which Kundera describes as ‘a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery’. The book is all a patchwork that requires astonishing deftness, and Kundera is astonishingly deft.

He is very good on the significance of gesture, or of stereotyped movements and how they can be interpreted – it is, after all, the wave of an arm that kicks off the stream of connected images at the beginning of Immortality. Here he is on one of the varieties of laughter in the book:

You certainly remember this scene from dozens of bad films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running, running, running, and laughing. By laughing the two runners are proclaiming to the whole world, to audiences in all the movie theatres: “We’re happy, we’re glad to be in the world, we’re in agreement with being!” It’s a silly scene, a cliche, but it expresses a basic human attitude: serious laughter, laughter ‘beyond joking’.

All churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties, are in agreement about that kind of laughter, and all of them rush to put the image of the two laughing runners on their billboards advertising their religion, their products, their ideology, their nation, their sex, their dishwashing powder.

Kundera has a level of control, and imagination, that makes these patchworks succeed. Indeed, his novels that try to follow a traditional narrative structure are the least successful, to my mind. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is such a triumph because he seems to throw out all the rules, and start from scratch with what a book can be. The characters and their paths, as they appear, are still vivid and vital – and there is a pain and hope throughout that can only come one whose homeland has been political hell. And there is, indeed, much humour – sometimes cynical, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes almost naively joyful.

It’s a brilliant mixture that I (at least) have to be in the right mood for, or it doesn’t click. Luckily I was in exactly the right mood when I picked up The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – and I very much recommend you give him a try.