The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Characters

Who Is "I"?Will the real Milan Kundera please stand up?As with all novels that have bits of autobiographical details and an intrusive first-person narrator, it's tempting to just assume the narrato...

Revisionist HistorianIt's no mistake that Kundera opens Mirek's story with the story about Clementis' hat on Gottwald's head—that story opens up the theme of memory for exploration, a major conce...

Karel has some serious issues with women—though what man in this book doesn't? In all the years of his marriage to Marketa, he's managed to alienate both his mother and his wife. He ignores his m...

Who Is Tamina?There's an easy answer to this question: Tamina is a widowed émigré from Communist Czechoslovakia who works a dead-end job in a little café in some boring Western European town.But...

MiseryKundera says that the student is litost incarnate. In fact, in order to explain that untranslatable word to us—it means "torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery"—he gives...

A Lost SoulJan's got 99 problems, and women make up about 98 of them.The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is "a novel in the form of variations," with parts that are like "...the various stages of a...

Not Miss CzechoslovakiaWe really only know two things about Zdena, Mirek's former lover. First, she's not exactly a Betty (translation: she's super ugly). It's so bad that Mirek thinks about her la...

Marketa finds herself in a very unhappy place in her life: she's stuck in a marriage with a woman-chasing husband, feeling very excluded and sorry for herself. It wasn't always this way: in her you...

A Modern WomanEva may be an absolute beginner when she first encounters Karel—that striptease to classical music says it all; hopefully it at least wasn't something like the Ride of the Valkyries...

Karel's mother (and Marketa's mother-in-law) is pretty much a walking stereotype. When the couple are first married, they can hardly stand to spend time around her because she wants to be all up in...

If you've ever seen Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, you're already familiar with Gabrielle and Michelle.Gabrielle and Michelle, however, are not particularly nice girls; they're privileged...

We all know a Madame Raphael: a joiner at heart, but with no club or church or sorority or clique that either suits her or will accept her. Perhaps you've even been like her. Madame Raphael is the...

Sarah plays a small but significant role in Part III, when she interrupts Gabrielle and Michelle's ridiculous presentation on Ionesco's play in order to exact revenge. She needs to get back at the...

Kundera includes the story of his father's final illness to illustrate the absurdity and futility of human existence. Hey, you knew this was Eastern European literature, right?There's no sugarcoati...

We never get the full name of Kundera's young editor friend who shows him compassion after he's fallen out of the Communist Party's favor. Is it because he's somehow trying to protect her by keepin...

Just in case you were wondering, Hugo is a thoroughly nasty character. He's just about the worst thing that could happen to Tamina—except maybe the creepy children of the island. Hugo's interfere...

Bibi frequents the café where Tamina works, and she spends some part of each day sitting on a stool (with her pee-drenched, neglected baby crawling around on the floor) and chewing Tamina's ear of...

This silver-tongued stranger appears at Tamina's café and basically talks her into submission—and into his sports car. Raphael knows everything about Tamina and her obsession with the past. He t...

This is the sexually precocious boy of 12 who waits to ferry Tamina to the island of children. He's definitely an odd duck, and one that defies strict decoding. It's clear that he's meant to repres...

Muse in TrainingKristyna doesn't seem to rank up there with (the real) Petrarch's Laura or Dante's Beatrice. She's a butcher's wife, for one thing. And for another, she's hooking up with the local...

We have to remind you that Petrarch is not the real Petrarch, and Boccaccio is not the real Boccaccio: these are meant to be nicknames for Czechoslovakian poets who are affiliated with the universi...

Edwige is another female character Kundera appears to like and have sympathy for. She's a feminist who doesn't have time for Jan's stupid theory that male arousal is forever tied to rape fantasies....

There are two things that everybody in Jan's world will remember about Victor Passer: his irrepressible spirit in the face of great physical trials and the hilarious thing that happened at his fune...

A minor character calls this lady "Field Marshal Barbara"—and for good reason. When she opens her villa for an afternoon of pleasure (ahem, "collective sex entertainments"), she's pretty serious...

If Hanna had a contemporary counterpart, we're thinking it would be Gwyneth Paltrow. She's a gorgeous actress whose branding is on fleek—and she knows it. Hanna knows that even the disasters of h...

The Clevises consist of Papa and Mama and a very precocious 14-year-old daughter. The Clevises are the Goldilockses of progressive ideology: they support liberal ideas, but only if they're not too...