Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera is the most secret of the acclaimed Czech writer's novels. This new translation is the first to be fully authorized by Milan Kundera.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

Kundera's forte is a sort of gently sad, sexy comedy in which his characters know they shouldn't. . . but do anyway. According to one of the apothegms in this book of allegorical sketches, ""The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past""; and that's a key to Kundera's work. Governments--like Kundera's own Czechoslovakia, which took back his citizenship after French publication of this book a year ago--are seen in clumsy attempts at rewriting history. And people behave pretty much that way too, especially when it comes to sex--which in Kundera's scheme usually ends up in one or both of two categories: hysterically laughable or too sad for words. A widowed waitress, desiring the return of her love letters and diaries left behind in Czechoslovakia after she fled, submits to the crude attentions of a younger man who promises to make the trip to fetch them out--but of course he doesn't. Poets get together to confess powerlessness before women. A group-sex party is too absurd for certain participants to hold back the guffaws. And, at his best, when lightly allegorical, Kundera gently nudges us over to his way of looking at things. But when he leaves out the representational level altogether, he's much less successful--as when, here, he belabors a concept of the ""border"" that separates us from our political and social and sexual true states. Intriguing yet uneven work, then, from a writer (The Joke, The Farewell Party) whose moody humor only sometimes builds up enough steam to move this quilt-like book along. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

One of the foremost contemporary Czech writers, Kundera is a novelist, poet, and playwright. His play The Keeper of the Keys, produced in Czechoslovakia in 1962, has long been performed in a dozen countries. His first novel, The Joke (1967), is a biting satire on the political atmosphere in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. It tells the story of a young Communist whose life is ruined because of a minor indiscretion: writing a postcard to his girlfriend in which he mocks her political fervor.The Joke has been translated into a dozen languages and was made into a film, which Kundera wrote and directed. His novel Life Is Elsewhere won the 1973 Prix de Medicis for the best foreign novel. Kundera has been living in France since 1975. His books, for a long time suppressed in his native country, are once again published.The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), won him international fame and was a successful English-language film. In this work Kundera moves toward more universal and philosophically tinged themes, thus transforming himself from a political dissident into a writer of international significance.

(Bowker Author Biography)