The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Commissioned and closely monitored by Milan Kundera himself, this new translation brings a clarity and unmatched fidelity to the author’s original text. Widely held as a work of genius, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” is the novel that first brought him to the forefront of the international literary scene. Rich in stories, characters and imaginative range, it was written while Kundera was still forbidden to publish in his home country of Czechoslovakia, which was then behind the Iron Curtain. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of modern existence — from the posthumous erasure of “enemies” of communism from the historical record, to the subtle agony of the fading memory of a lost love, to the bizarre sexlessnes of modern promiscuity — are explored with boldness, subversive humor and the magical power of fiction.