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 Forgetting. He begins with Mirek, the most unreliable narrator in the world. Mirek is revising his past by the minute, hoping for a better life story. And then there's Karel, who leaps through space and time to fulfill his sexual fantasies.
Kundera also sends us, along with Tamina, into the Other World, complete with a charismatic (though disguised) archangel and a ferryman, to witness her torment on an island of creepy children. Then, we witness Kundera's father "riding" into death, exploring the interior of his mind without the ability to describe any of it.
Holding all this together is Kundera's own surreal experience of falling out of favor with the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. His intense isolation makes him feel like he's reenacting Paradise Lost—as Lucifer or Adam. He and his characters inhabit a world where angels and devils are real (and indistinguishable), and the probability of living a nightmarish alternate life is pretty darn high.
Questions About Versions of Reality
- What exactly is "the border" that Jan and Kundera go on about?
- How do unreliable narrators—like Mirek and even Kundera—shape our experience of the text?
- What role do the supernatural or magical realism play in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting? How different would the novel be without these elements?
- What happens when male characters begin to see things from a woman's perspective? How does it change their experience of the world, if at all?
Chew on This
Tamina's island is not the only other world in Kundera's novel.
Angels may be as terrifying as devils in this work, making it harder to differentiate between good and evil.