Kundera The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

About Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) is his most formally inventive novel — a work in seven loosely connected parts exploring the Czech experience of Communist totalitarianism through the intertwined themes of memory and forgetting. Each part has different characters and a different mode (essay, fiction, dream, memoir), but all circle the same questions: how a political system controls the past by erasing it, what laughter means in a world where conformity is survival, and what forgetting does to those who are forgotten. The novel contains the famous passage about President Clementis being airbrushed out of a photograph after his execution — one of the defining images of totalitarian reality-control. Published in France in 1979 after Kundera's emigration, it led to the revocation of his Czech citizenship.