Scan barcode
A review by lpm100
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
fast-paced
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.0
Book Review
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Milan Kundera
1/5 stars
"Overwrought, overdone, and 312 pages to get a couple of dozen good quotes."
This is the third book that I have read by Milan kundera. (The first two being "The Joke" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being.")
I was piqued to purchase this when I recently learned of his death--and I had read some good reviews about this book. (After reading this, I have come to suspect that: people read books like this so that they can show other people how smart they are by pretending to understand.)
It's (approximately) an extended meditation on laughter and forgetting, and it is true that they mean different things at different times.
The book was written in Czech first and then translated to French and then later to English.
On the one hand: His prose reads beautifully when translated into English (maybe profound thoughts are language-independent?). And he could have been the one to put down some memorable thoughts on a great topic.
On the other: most of the book is utterly incomprehensible.
He employs the literary technique known as "magical realism" (and I have to admit here that fiction books are only about 10% of all that I read). I've only encountered magical realism in a few cases (Tony Morrison's "Song of Solomon"/Maxine Hong Kingston's "Woman Warrior"/Stephen King's "Rose Madder").
For some reason, magical realism was readable in the context of those books, but not this one. (It was also not present in the other two books of Kundera's that I read.)
I did not read the Cliff's notes to try to explain to me what he could have been talking about, because that would be admitting to defeat.
Also, the book is just not worth it.
There are lots of stories about people with conflicted emotional states interspersed by some insights. (Perhaps this is the graphomania that is marked by condera, but that is very present in this work.)
But, for people like me who work all day get bills paid, we "dream no dreams and nurse no grievances" and conflicted emotional states are secondary to getting the house note paid, let alone reading about somebody else's.
What I take from the book is:
---Laughter. Something that you make yourself do to forget the present. Two types of laughter: that of devils (sardonic and nihilistic) and that of the angels (laughable laughter).
---Forgetting. Something that you do voluntarily in order to forget a painful past. Something that you do involuntarily as once-important memories fade away. When memories fade away, there is only the present. (And in communist countries, there is no past or future; only "an eternal present in which the party is always right.")
What Kundera knows is being exiled from the Czech Republic as well as the unpleasantness of the Russian occupation, and it is formed the basis of many of his books. (At this point, this subject has run into diminishing returns.)
In this one, at first Communists were welcomed by the "better half of the nation" (p.10)--at the beginning - - but down the road, it became the "2% of the nation still believed in the Communist Party."
Seven stories are claimed to be interwoven, but they are only this inasmuch as Kudera comes into narrate. The characters have no relation to each other outside of their own story.
The 7 chapters:
1. "Lost letters." A scientist is reassigned a job as a construction worker for political reasons. ("They were forced to leave their jobs for isolated workshops in the depths of the country - - that is to say, for places where no one would ever hear their voices.")
2. "Mama." A married couple in a menage à trois.
3. "The Angels." Delineation of different types of laughter with a parable involving angels and devils. The beginning of the events that forced him to leave Czechoslovakia.
4. "Lost Letters." A woman is trying to retrieve her husband's Love letters to her in difficult circumstances, because her memory of him is starting to fade.
5. "Litost." The story of a frustrated love affair and how misery loves company - - accompanied by overdefinition of the title word.
6. "Angels" Tamina takes a magical realist to an island of children with some perplexing symbolism, and Kundera spends time with his dying father who has lost his ability to speak.
7. "The Border." An aging Playboy takes stock of his life. Another person dies from some unknown illness. Odds and ends events.
*******
Verdict: NOT recommended.
This is, however, a most quotable book, and really that is the ONLY value of this book.
I will present the ones that I thought best so it can save a jealous-of-his-time reader the trouble:
1. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
2. .... Just as she was capable of imbuing the most abstract relationship with the most concrete feeling, so she was capable of giving the most concrete of acts an abstract significance and her own dissatisfaction a political name.
3. Since there is not a single historic event we can count on being commonly known, I must speak of events that took place a few years ago as if they were a thousand years old.
4. For he was aware of the great secret of life: women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.
5. Historical events mostly imitate one another without any talent, but it seems to me that in Bohemia history staged an unprecedented experiment.
6. He was familiar with this kind of deal. They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past.
7. Just as someone in pain is linked by his groans to the present moment (and is entirely outside past and future), so someone bursting out in such ecstatic laughter is without memory and without desire, for he is admitting his shout into the world's present moment and wishes to know only that.
8. "... and in his often vacant gaze you could recognize the sadness of a man who realizes that the stars merely promise him suffering."
9. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past.
10. There are two laughters, and we have no word to tell one from the other.
11. The conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address our sales to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.
12. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. And the era of universal graphomania (a mania for writing books), the writing of books has an opposite meaning semicolon every once surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside.
13. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.
14. Those who are fascinated by the idea of progress do not suspect that everything moving forward is at the same time bringing the end nearer and the joyous watch words like "forward" and "farther" are the lascivious voice of death urging us to hasten to it.
15.... it was a strange conversation between someone who nothing but a great many words and one who knew everything but not a single word.
16. It's just those details - - poorly chosen clothes, slightly flawed teeth, delightful mediocrity of soul - - that make a woman lively and real.
17. Oh yes, my Gd, the memory of revulsion is stronger than the memory of tenderness!
18. Death has a double aspect: it is not being. But it is also being, the terrifyingly material being of a corpse.
19. Our only immortality is in the police files.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Milan Kundera
1/5 stars
"Overwrought, overdone, and 312 pages to get a couple of dozen good quotes."
This is the third book that I have read by Milan kundera. (The first two being "The Joke" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being.")
I was piqued to purchase this when I recently learned of his death--and I had read some good reviews about this book. (After reading this, I have come to suspect that: people read books like this so that they can show other people how smart they are by pretending to understand.)
It's (approximately) an extended meditation on laughter and forgetting, and it is true that they mean different things at different times.
The book was written in Czech first and then translated to French and then later to English.
On the one hand: His prose reads beautifully when translated into English (maybe profound thoughts are language-independent?). And he could have been the one to put down some memorable thoughts on a great topic.
On the other: most of the book is utterly incomprehensible.
He employs the literary technique known as "magical realism" (and I have to admit here that fiction books are only about 10% of all that I read). I've only encountered magical realism in a few cases (Tony Morrison's "Song of Solomon"/Maxine Hong Kingston's "Woman Warrior"/Stephen King's "Rose Madder").
For some reason, magical realism was readable in the context of those books, but not this one. (It was also not present in the other two books of Kundera's that I read.)
I did not read the Cliff's notes to try to explain to me what he could have been talking about, because that would be admitting to defeat.
Also, the book is just not worth it.
There are lots of stories about people with conflicted emotional states interspersed by some insights. (Perhaps this is the graphomania that is marked by condera, but that is very present in this work.)
But, for people like me who work all day get bills paid, we "dream no dreams and nurse no grievances" and conflicted emotional states are secondary to getting the house note paid, let alone reading about somebody else's.
What I take from the book is:
---Laughter. Something that you make yourself do to forget the present. Two types of laughter: that of devils (sardonic and nihilistic) and that of the angels (laughable laughter).
---Forgetting. Something that you do voluntarily in order to forget a painful past. Something that you do involuntarily as once-important memories fade away. When memories fade away, there is only the present. (And in communist countries, there is no past or future; only "an eternal present in which the party is always right.")
What Kundera knows is being exiled from the Czech Republic as well as the unpleasantness of the Russian occupation, and it is formed the basis of many of his books. (At this point, this subject has run into diminishing returns.)
In this one, at first Communists were welcomed by the "better half of the nation" (p.10)--at the beginning - - but down the road, it became the "2% of the nation still believed in the Communist Party."
Seven stories are claimed to be interwoven, but they are only this inasmuch as Kudera comes into narrate. The characters have no relation to each other outside of their own story.
The 7 chapters:
1. "Lost letters." A scientist is reassigned a job as a construction worker for political reasons. ("They were forced to leave their jobs for isolated workshops in the depths of the country - - that is to say, for places where no one would ever hear their voices.")
2. "Mama." A married couple in a menage à trois.
3. "The Angels." Delineation of different types of laughter with a parable involving angels and devils. The beginning of the events that forced him to leave Czechoslovakia.
4. "Lost Letters." A woman is trying to retrieve her husband's Love letters to her in difficult circumstances, because her memory of him is starting to fade.
5. "Litost." The story of a frustrated love affair and how misery loves company - - accompanied by overdefinition of the title word.
6. "Angels" Tamina takes a magical realist to an island of children with some perplexing symbolism, and Kundera spends time with his dying father who has lost his ability to speak.
7. "The Border." An aging Playboy takes stock of his life. Another person dies from some unknown illness. Odds and ends events.
*******
Verdict: NOT recommended.
This is, however, a most quotable book, and really that is the ONLY value of this book.
I will present the ones that I thought best so it can save a jealous-of-his-time reader the trouble:
1. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
2. .... Just as she was capable of imbuing the most abstract relationship with the most concrete feeling, so she was capable of giving the most concrete of acts an abstract significance and her own dissatisfaction a political name.
3. Since there is not a single historic event we can count on being commonly known, I must speak of events that took place a few years ago as if they were a thousand years old.
4. For he was aware of the great secret of life: women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.
5. Historical events mostly imitate one another without any talent, but it seems to me that in Bohemia history staged an unprecedented experiment.
6. He was familiar with this kind of deal. They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past.
7. Just as someone in pain is linked by his groans to the present moment (and is entirely outside past and future), so someone bursting out in such ecstatic laughter is without memory and without desire, for he is admitting his shout into the world's present moment and wishes to know only that.
8. "... and in his often vacant gaze you could recognize the sadness of a man who realizes that the stars merely promise him suffering."
9. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past.
10. There are two laughters, and we have no word to tell one from the other.
11. The conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address our sales to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.
12. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. And the era of universal graphomania (a mania for writing books), the writing of books has an opposite meaning semicolon every once surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside.
13. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.
14. Those who are fascinated by the idea of progress do not suspect that everything moving forward is at the same time bringing the end nearer and the joyous watch words like "forward" and "farther" are the lascivious voice of death urging us to hasten to it.
15.... it was a strange conversation between someone who nothing but a great many words and one who knew everything but not a single word.
16. It's just those details - - poorly chosen clothes, slightly flawed teeth, delightful mediocrity of soul - - that make a woman lively and real.
17. Oh yes, my Gd, the memory of revulsion is stronger than the memory of tenderness!
18. Death has a double aspect: it is not being. But it is also being, the terrifyingly material being of a corpse.
19. Our only immortality is in the police files.