Kundera The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Reading Order

Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) is arguably his most formally inventive and politically urgent novel — a work in seven loosely connected parts that explores the Czech experience of Communist totalitarianism through the lens of memory and forgetting. Each part has different characters and a different mode — essay, fiction, dream, memoir — but all circle the same theme: how a political system erases the past by controlling memory, and what laughter and forgetting mean in a world where the former can be subversive and the latter can be a form of murder. The novel contains the famous passage in which Kundera describes how the Czech Communist leader Clementis is airbrushed out of a famous photograph after his execution — history literally rewritten — and it gave the intellectual world one of its most potent images of totalitarian reality-control.