The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Themes

Kundera's friend, Milan Hübl, tells him that the easiest way to get rid of an entire nation is to destroy its memory—its literature, culture, and history. When shared memories are erased, the vo...

Just take a look at the opening of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: it's a presto-change-o moment in the political life of Bohemia, when a photo featuring two prominent men suddenly becomes a p...

If you ask Milan Kundera, to be alive is to feel the extreme weightiness of existence. Yeah, we know. Weight comes to us in many forms: past lives, sexuality, mortality, angst, self-hatred, grief....

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera uses the symbol of the ring dance to highlight the sense of inclusivity and community that none of his characters can access—not Mirek on his way t...

Words—whether written or spoken—tend to fail the characters in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in spectacular ways. In Communist Czechoslovakia, words can destroy private citizens (just thi...

Who better to ask about love than a bunch of poets? That's what happens in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, anyway, where a bunch of dudes come together to talk about what love should be—by w...

Heads up, folks: there is a ton of sex in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.If you're feeling a little disturbed by the sexual relationships in this book, you're not alone: there really are no un...

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, we see women mostly through male eyes. Male gaze, anyone? Kundera is well aware of the irony of this situation, and he totally pokes fun at both sides of the...

Hey, the book is basically a bunch of interconnected stories that are variations on a theme, so it's no surprise that Kundera plays with various levels of reality in The Book of Laughter and Forget...

We feel like we should be able to say "Communism = bad stuff" and be done with it—insert mic drop here—but it's way more complex than that. The political experiences of Czechoslovakia up until...