The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Part VI Summary

The Angels

• Kundera circles back to the story of Communist leader Klement Gottwald accepting Clementis' fur hat. (Remember the opening of Part I?)
• Then, Franz Kafka makes an appearance. Apparently, the balcony that the Communist leaders stood upon was once part of a German school—Kafka's school.
• Kundera says that Kafka talks about Prague as a "city without memory" in his novel The Trial. Even his protagonist remembers nothing.
• Prague is also a place that constantly erases its own history, replacing the names of streets and public structures with names related to whatever the current regime is.
• Kundera sees this pattern of building and erasure everywhere—including on the street where his character Tamina was born. The street name changed about five times while her family lived there.
• And for those who do remember, there are the monuments about town that have come and gone.
• During this time, statues of Lenin are all the rage, as Stalin is sooo last season.
• We get more about Czechoslovakia as the "Republic of Forgetting." Kundera calls Gustav Husak, the last Communist president of Czechoslovakia, the "President of Forgetting."
• Husak is not a nice guy. Under him, intellectuals were persecuted, and culture was destroyed. His major target? Historians.
• Kundera says that this is not a coincidence. His friend Milan Hübl, a historian, tells him that the fastest way to destroy a culture is to obliterate its history (i.e., its history books and historians). Then a new history can be rewritten to suit the new guy(s) in charge.
• Kundera knows that this is happening to his people, and he knows it will mean the death of their lives as Czechs.
• A dark time falls on Kundera: his father is dying, and his friend Hübl is arrested and sentenced to a long prison term. Things are not going well.
• Kundera's dad has trouble finding words for things, and by the end, he loses nearly all his vocab. He can still say, "That's strange," which seems utterly appropriate.
• The problem? Dad's mind is still working, but he can't communicate.
• And as in most parent-child relationships, Kundera regrets not talking more with his dad when the old man still had the power of speech.
• Kundera's dad was writing a book about Beethoven's sonatas, so Kundera tries to discuss it with his dad. But though he can talk up a storm, he knows nothing about Beethoven. Dad knows it all, but he can't speak. Oh, the irony.
• Kundera's dad has an epiphany one day about Beethoven's variations, but he has only just enough words to tell his son that he's got an idea. He can't actually communicate it.
• Kundera is now preoccupied with silence: his father's silence, and the enforced silence of the historians who were arrested by the Communist regime in Bohemia.
• Which brings Kundera back to Tamina. She's still a waitress at the café in the shabby Western town. But she's no longer her old self. She couldn't possibly care less about the chatter of the customers any more. She and Bibi are no longer friends.
• One day, Tamina drops off the face of the earth. Her boss goes to her apartment to check on her, but there's no Tamina there. And the police never, ever solve the mystery of her disappearance.
• Kundera sheds some light on Tamina's disappearance. A young man comes to the café one day and calls Tamina by name; he seems to know about her sad existence. He talks to her, asks her questions—and Tamina's hooked. No one has actually asked her anything since her husband died.
• The young man tells Tamina that she has the remembering thing all wrong. She's actually forgetting and can't forgive herself for doing it. He tells her to forget about it.
• But Tamina doesn't know how to let it go. She wants the heaviness of the past to leave her, but still, it's always with her.
• The young man tells Tamina that she needs to get away to a place where such heavy memories aren't a thing. A weightless place.
• At this point, Tamina is totally under the young man's spell, and she leaves the café with him.
• Kundera says that he understands Tamina's inability to forgive herself about the past. He felt the same way about his own dad.
• But this prick of conscience actually helped Kundera figure out what his old man wanted to say about Beethoven but couldn't.
• Kundera uses similes to explain the function of a musical variation. Symphonies are like epics, where we journey through the wide world from point A to point B.
• Variations are journeys through the interior. Because of its "compactness," variation form is a bit like a poem: it requires economical expression.
• Kundera says that Beethoven uses the 16 measures of the variation form to dig deep, like going "into the interior of the earth."
• So, okay, we might not ever journey enough to experience everything in the world, but it seems frustrating that we might not even be able to know our own interior selves—or those of our loved ones.
• And that is where Tamina's and Kundera's remorse sets in.
• Kundera and Tamina spend their time worrying about the exterior world when they're in the process of losing the interior lives of the people they love the best.
• Heavy.
• And that, Kundera says, is why wise Beethoven stuck with those inward-looking variations toward the end of his life.
• Kundera claims that his novel takes on the form of musical variations: he's putting stories together that allow us to journey to the interior.
• To the interior of what? Well, lots of things, but really, the center of the whole thing is Tamina. That's right: Kundera claims that the other stories in this work are variations on the theme of Tamina.
• However, in addition to being about Tamina and Prague, the book is about angels. And wouldn't you know it, the young man who whisks Tamina away is called Raphael.
• And now we're with Tamina and Raphael in the car, as he drives her farther away from her old life.
• In fact, Raphael takes Tamina to a creepy, murky body of water. How can this end well?
• Even Tamina, who has been living her life like a sleepwalker, suddenly wakes up to the danger of her situation.
• The ugly landscape reminds her of the place back in Bohemia where her husband worked as a bulldozer operator. All the despair of that time comes back to her.
• But Tamina has no notebooks with her to write down this memory. She wants to go back because now she feels like she has a framework for looking back into the past.
• Tamina is exhilarated because, like Kundera's dad, she's had an epiphany: memories don't just walk back into your mind. You have to journey out into the world to find them.
• But Tamina can't say any of this to Raphael because someone by the water is waiting for them.
• Raphael gets rough with Tamina and pulls her down to the shore. A 12-year-old boy greets them. He has a rowboat for them.
• Both Raphael and the boy start laughing, and Tamina begins to forget again. She gets into the boat with the boy; Raphael stays on the shore. He's smiling and shaking his head.
• Tamina's pretty darn uneasy about that gesture.
• Tamina takes over the rowing from the boy. He takes out a tape recorder and plays some hardcore rock music, and he begins moving in ways that seem obscene to Tamina.
• Tamina wants to hand the oars back to the boy, but he gets nasty with her and commands her to go on. Soon, she sees land.
• Tamina and the boy are greeted by children at the shore of this new island, and they walk up a path to a building. Tamina notices some low-hanging volleyball nets out front.
• A little girl escorts Tamina and the boy into the building, where Tamina sees a dormitory room with beds. Her new home.
• Tamina is kind of appalled: she's too old for dorm life. But the creepy girl tells her that children don't need rooms of their own.
• What?
• There are no adults in sight, and the little girl seems to ignore Tamina's alarm.
• Tamina has been assigned to the Squirrels—you know, just like a group at camp.
• Suddenly, Tamina realizes that she does not want to be there, and she asks about the freaky little boy who brought her to the island. She tells the 9-year-old girl that she never asked to come there.
• But the little girl isn't having any of it. She tells Tamina that she must be lying since no one goes on a journey without consent.
• Tamina runs back to the shore to find the boy, but he and the boat are gone. She's stuck with the creepy little kids and her placement on the Squirrels team.
• The kids greet Tamina when she returns and ask her to join them in their circle. Tamina thinks about Raphael smiling and shaking his head. This freaks her out.
• Tamina leaves the children to go curl up on her dorm bed.
• Kundera gives us the 411 on Tamina's husband, Pavel. He died in a hospital—at night, when Tamina wasn't there. In the morning, she found his bed empty.
• Pavel's roommate said that Tamina's husband's body was dragged by the feet across the floor.
• Kundera muses over what death means to us at different ages. For the young Tamina, fear of death was a fear of nonexistence.
• But Tamina's biggest adult fear concerning death? Becoming a corpse. Suddenly, everyone has access to your body—and you can't do anything to protect yourself.
• Tamina wanted to cremate her husband for this reason, so she wouldn't have to worry about his body being defiled over time.
• Kundera goes back to the Thomas Mann story of the fatally ill young man. On his journey into death, he stays in a room where a beautiful naked woman appears every night. The woman tells him a tale. Kundera says that the woman and the tale are death. Yes, it is beautiful. And strange. And also blue in color.
• Blue? Yes, indeed. Kundera says that nonbeing is "infinite empty space," and we all know that empty space is blue. Duh.
• But Kundera (and Tamina) don't buy this "death as beautiful blue experience" thing. They know it is hard, tiresome work. Kundera experienced it with his father.
• Kundera likens his father's journey toward death to riding a horse to a faraway place. All deaths are journeys—like Tamina's drive to the water in a red sports car.
• Kundera believes that the desire for the death journey has to do with the dying person's urge to hide his or her body. You know, so no one can do bad things to it. But it doesn't work, as we see with Tamina's husband.
• Kundera explores just why he put poor Tamina on that island with all those creepy children. Maybe it's because he remembers children singing as his father died.
• It went down like this: Gustav Husak was receiving his honorary Pioneer kerchief from some children at Prague Castle.
• Kundera and his father could hear the ceremony from the TV in the house across the garden.
• The doctor told Kundera that his father wasn't aware of the outside world anymore, but Kundera was pretty sure that was wrong. He joked with his dad about Husak and the Pioneers.
• And his dad laughed back.
• Kundera heard Husak's ridiculous rhetoric and closed the windows so they wouldn't have to listen to it anymore.
• After that, Kundera says, his dad "mounted his horse" and rode off into the sunset. So to speak.
• Tamina tries to figure out a way to escape the island, but she has no luck. And what to do about all the children surrounding her? Tamina tries to ignore them, but they get scarily hostile. So now she's trying to appease them by playing their games.
• Worst of all, Tamina has to go to the bathroom with these kids (remember kindergarten bathroom time?) and undress in front of them. They all stare at her grown-up body, and it creeps her out.
• Still, Tamina feels kind of powerful. Her body is grown and perfect, something that she has over all those kiddos.
• Tamina gives in to life on the island. It's a journey back into childhood, a place in time before her life with her husband. She can forget all that tragedy here.
• Tamina has to give up on her shyness about her body, and she seems to adjust well to communal nakedness. She doesn't have to worry about adult sexuality here.
• But Tamina does have to concern herself with budding, preadolescent sexual curiosity. She imagines herself as that pretty first-grade teacher that she once had a girl-crush on—the one she wanted to go to the bathroom with. She can understand the arousal of the kids now.
• Tamina's team, the Squirrels, really benefits from her bigness. They win all the competitions on the island.
• The children wait on Tamina hand and foot when she is in the bathroom. And they get a little touchy-feely in the process: they want to explore her body because it is strange and inviting to them.
• At bedtime, things get especially weird. The children tuck in Tamina, but they find every excuse to touch all the parts of her body that are different from theirs. (Hint: the private bits.)
• Tamina is actually okay with it. It feels good and comforting to her.
• Tamina is feeling a lot of pleasure, and the kids can see that in her face. It fascinates them.
• Tamina doesn't care about the weirdness of the situation because it's like her soul has detached from her body, and all that's left is a body feeling really good and enjoying itself.
• It's back to Kundera and his dad. Kundera shares his dad's explanation of musical scales, which he compares to a royal court.
• Because the notes become players at court in this analogy, music becomes something more than sound for Kundera. It becomes action—a royal drama.
• Music appeals to everyone for this reason: everyone can make a guess about the narrative playing out in the notes.
• Kundera then tells a story about a kind of musical Communism. He says that this "royal hierarchy" of notes one day gets overthrown by one man who wants to make all notes equal.
• This man establishes the 12-tone system, a new musical empire. But like all empires, this one is overthrown and replaced by a new one.
• This story brings Kundera back to his unfortunate historian friend Milan Hübl and leads to a discussion about how it's impossible for human beings to fathom the end of anything: history, time, cultures, languages, countries.
• Kundera believes that we all live an illusion, expecting "infinitude"—that nothing connected with us will ever end or die.
• Progress, then, is just another way to talk about the death of other things. But we never really think about it in that way.
• So it was that the composer Arnold Schoenberg, Emperor of the 12-Tone, neither thought about the royal musical court that he displaced nor about the sudden death waiting for his own kingdom.
• Kundera says that the history of music is over, and its end was brought about by a desire for progress and change.
• Kundera muses on the end of musical history. It doesn't mean total silence; instead, it means that anything goes.
• It's pretty clear that Kundera is not a fan of rock or pop music. He says there's a kind of unifying power in this hateful music. It helps people reaffirm that they are alive and existing (not a good thing for Kundera), which is why it's more popular than Beethoven.
• Kundera remembers taking his father for a walk about a year before he died and hearing music blaring through loudspeakers. Apparently, this was something the Communist regime did to keep people from thinking or remembering.
• Kundera's dad, who had a hard time speaking, was able to comment on the stupidity of the music. He wasn't dissing the music he'd loved all his life; he was talking about thoughtless music. The music that Kundera's father loved so much was an exception to the stupidity of music in its thoughtless state.
• But all that wonderful history of exceptional music is lost to "the idiocy of guitars."
• We're guessing Kundera wasn't a fan of the Sex Pistols.
• Kundera refers to the pop singer Karel Klos, who left Czechoslovakia in 1977. President Husak begged him to return because Klos created music without memory. It's a music that disregards and tramples on what Kundera and his father believe to be historically rich music (like Ellington and Schoenberg.)
• Perfect for the "President of Forgetting."
• Though Kundera laments the rise of thoughtless, soulless guitar music, he also totally gets that hanging out with Beethoven all the time is "dangerous": it's a position of privilege, and Kundera has seen firsthand the kind of damage that privilege can do.
• Which brings us back to Tamina. She's thinking that she's being punished for having had a happy love with her husband. She'd been living a privileged life, and now she has to pay.
• But good love is also difficult because you are living in constant fear of losing it—or annoying the people around you who are jealous.
• So maybe the sensual pleasure Tamina now feels on the island with the children—sensuality without thought or fear—is a reward for her suffering.
• Kundera describes adult love as a regime that takes over and "occupies" sexuality, which makes sex less about pleasure and more about responsibility and drama.
• On the island, Tamina's sexuality is freed from any "diabolic" ties to love. Which means, of course, that what she feels is angelic.
• But now, Kundera's language about Tamina and the children changes. He describes the children's actions as the "rape" of Tamina.
• Because it happens every day, the children's touches become kind of dirty. The angelic nature of their "innocent" curiosity changes with their developing desire and with the repetition of the touches.
• A new hierarchy is established among the kids—and it's disturbing. Those who love the little sex games are set apart from those who don't. And some kids think that others are favorites. Creepy.
• The hostility grows until one day, a kid gives Tamina a purple nurple. She doesn't like having her nipple tweaked, so she stops the games.
• The kids hate having no access to Tamina's body. When she participates in their games, the teams fight over whether or not she's following the rules.
• There's a lot of shouting, and Tamina can't take it. She accepts the blame for stepping on the line in hopscotch, just to get some peace.
• But this is a bad mistake. Her own team—the beloved Squirrels—turns against her. They attack.
• Well, then Tamina beats the &#@% out of the kids.
• In the end, Tamina takes a rock to the forehead and slinks away to the dorm. She's never gonna play with these kids again.
• Then, the verbal abuse starts. The kids begin to taunt Tamina for all those adult private bits that they once so loved. They chase her all over the island chanting, "Tits, tits, tits."
• Not creepy at all.
• Tamina decides to engage in guerilla warfare. She ambushes and hurts as many kids as she can.
• One day, however, Tamina is caught in nets—the little volleyball-looking nets that had been hanging outside the dorm on the first day she arrived. They were always meant for her.
• The children drag Tamina off in their nets. Kundera says that the children really aren't bad types; they're just trying to share Tamina.
• The kids are using Tamina to draw closer to one another: she's the shared object of their hatred, a scapegoat for all their pent-up frustrations.
• Further, Tamina isn't really one of these kids. She's not part of their world. So it's easier and more appropriate for them to hurt her and hate her.
• Kundera keeps up the alternative reading of the children's behavior: Tamina is filled with negativity in hatred. The kids positively and cheerfully want to destroy her.
• Somehow, the children's anger gives way, and they let Tamina free. Not, of course, until they've beaten and peed on her. But, you know: all's fair in love and war.
• Tamina mechanically returns to playing with the children because she really has no choice. But she knows that she's not a part of their world and never can be; she's a border-dweller.
• And suddenly, the weightiness of Tamina's former existence returns. She has to keep playing hopscotch for all eternity.
• Think about that. All. Eternity.
• Tamina is so preoccupied with the horribleness of that thought that she no longer worries about her life in Prague with her husband.
• Kundera jumps over to some other children: the ones cheering for President Husak when they presented him with his Pioneer handkerchief.
• Kundera remembers Husak saying that children are the future, and suddenly, he catches another meaning from that phrase.
• It isn't a statement of hope to say that children are the future. To Kundera, it means that humanity is always devolving into childhood.
• Kundera also remembers Husak telling the children never to look back. Kundera knows what that was about: Husak wanted them to forget the past, to drop the weight of historical baggage.
• Kundera tells us there are differences between the "historical" and the "eternal." History is made up of fleeting moments and changes, but values are eternal. Husak is on the side of the eternal and unchanging. He's outside or beyond history. Who needs it?
• Kundera recalls the day he shut the window on the broadcast of Husak's speech to the children Pioneers. Karel Klos, the pop star, came on stage to rile up the emotions of the audience.
• But neither Kundera nor his father heard that bit. They also didn't witness the rainbow that broke out over Prague exactly at that moment.
• Some politicians have all the luck.
• Back on the island, Tamina hears the tape recorder music of the young boatman who brought her to this place and starts to form ideas of escape.
• All the children join the boatman in his obscene dancing, and Tamina can no longer stand it. She feels a hollowness in her stomach that Kundera calls an "unbearable absence of weight."
• But that lightness also has a weight to it, a kind of psychological impact that Tamina can no longer bear. The purposelessness of her existence on the island is getting to her.
• Tamina runs down to the shore looking for the boat, but it's not there. She makes a circuit of the small island—nothing. Then the children find her.
• Tamina decides that she don't need no stinking boat—she's going to swim back to her life under her own steam.
• The children chuck stones at Tamina as she swims away. But she's doing well, and soon their rocks can't touch her.
• Tamina feels good getting her body moving. That is, until the sun begins to set, and she still hasn't reached the other shore.
• Tamina isn't sure where she's headed, or why she's going there. She wants to get away—but not in Kundera's sense of dying. She wants to live.
• Tamina doesn't know where she wants to go, but she does know she wants to get the heck away from the island.
• The sun comes up, and Tamina realizes that after swimming all night, she's just a short distance from that cursed island and its brats. What?
• Tamina decides that the next best thing is to die, and the water will do just fine for her. She inhales water into her lungs.
• Now the kids come after Tamina—and not in a useful or pleasant way. Basically, they're just there to watch her die, up close.
• Long story short, Tamina drowns.