Editors Reads Verdict
Kundera's most formally daring book dissolves the novel's usual obligations — character continuity, linear plot — in order to enact its own argument: that memory is political, that forgetting is a form of power, and that laughter can be either liberation or complicity.
What We Loved
- The formal fragmentation is perfectly calibrated — each section illuminates the others without requiring conventional connection
- The opening image of Clementis's hat, left in the official photograph after his erasure, is one of the most powerful images in postwar European literature
- Kundera's essayistic passages on music theory and forgetting are genuinely illuminating rather than digressive
- The blend of autobiography, fiction, and history creates a density unavailable to conventional narrative
Minor Drawbacks
- Readers expecting a conventional novel will be disoriented — this is structured more like a musical composition than a story
- The authorial voice, while distinctive, can feel overbearing in passages where the storytelling could do the work alone
Key Takeaways
- → Totalitarianism operates first through the forgetting it enforces — erasure from photographs is erasure from history
- → Laughter has two kinds: the laughter of the devil, which delights in disorder, and the laughter of angels, which insists that everything makes sense — both are dangerous
- → The personal and the political are not separate realms; the regime's power over memory is the same power a lover exercises
- → Forgetting is not only a failure but sometimes a mercy — and sometimes a weapon
| Author | Milan Kundera |
|---|---|
| Publisher | HarperPerennial |
| Pages | 240 |
| Published | January 1, 1979 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Czech Literature, Postmodern Fiction |
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.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" about?
Seven loosely connected stories meditate on memory, forgetting, laughter, and totalitarianism — opening with a Communist official literally erased from a photograph by the regime that once celebrated him. Kundera's most formally experimental novel blurs fiction, essay, autobiography, and music theory into a structure that mirrors what it describes: the way history is rewritten, forgotten, laughed away.
What are the key takeaways from "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"?
Totalitarianism operates first through the forgetting it enforces — erasure from photographs is erasure from history Laughter has two kinds: the laughter of the devil, which delights in disorder, and the laughter of angels, which insists that everything makes sense — both are dangerous The personal and the political are not separate realms; the regime's power over memory is the same power a lover exercises Forgetting is not only a failure but sometimes a mercy — and sometimes a weapon
Is "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" worth reading?
Kundera's most formally daring book dissolves the novel's usual obligations — character continuity, linear plot — in order to enact its own argument: that memory is political, that forgetting is a form of power, and that laughter can be either liberation or complicity.
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