Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The Joke , Milan Kundera's first novel, of which Salman Rushdie wrote 'It is impossible to do justice here to the subtleties, comedy and wisdom of this very beautiful novel. The author of The Joke is clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.'

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This fifth English-language version of the ingenious first novel by the best-selling author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being ( LJ 5/1/84) is based on Michael Henry Heim's translation (Harper & Row, 1984), which Kundera originally praised but found wanting after more careful review. The new version replaces words and phrases with more idiomatic or precise substitutes, occasionally recasting whole sentences. As a result, the narrators are better differentiated and the language more alive and natural, particularly in the reflective passages. The story of Ludvik Jahn's misfired joke, which ruins his life by giving him a reputation as an enemy of the state, and his equally misfired attempt at revenge (seduction of the wife of the Party official he holds responsible for his misfortune) is well worth reading--and purchasing--again in this definitive version fully revised by the author.-- Marie Bednar, Pennsylvania State Univ. Libs., University Park (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

In this new English-language version of Kundera's classic first novel, completely revised by the author to incorporate the most accurate portions of two previous translations plus his own corrections, the narrator Ludvik wonders, ``What if History plays jokes?'' This politically charged question, coupled with Ludvik's fate as an unintentional dissident, struck a chord in Czech readers; the novel's 1967 publication was a key literary event of the Prague Spring. Looking back on the tense, McCarthy-like atmosphere of the late 1940s, it chronicles the disastrous results of Ludvik's prankish postcard to a girlfriend criticizing the Czech communist regime. He is expelled from the Communist Party, forced to leave the university and join a special army unit with other enemies of the state. Years later, after he has resumed his studies and become a successful scientist, his lingering anger at the man who engineered his expulsion culminates in an act of destructive sexual revenge that serves only to show Ludvik he has never really understood any woman and is indeed the butt of one of history's many cruel jokes. The fresh descriptions and masterful employment of several narrators testify to Kundera's power as a novelist, unmistakable even in this early work. ( July ) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Book Review

Though Kundera now describes the 1969 translation of The Joke (published by Coward, McCann) as ""incomplete and otherwise defective,"" the novel remains essentially the same in this new version by Michael Henry Heim--who translated Kundera's recent success, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. From the 1969 Kirkus review: ""A rather innocent youthful joke . . . metastasizes, bringing rejection, ostracism, and failure to all concerned but in particular to its perpetrator, Ludvik Jahn. . . . Actually this Czechoslovakian novel, told through the eyes of Ludvik and some of his associates, is a larger political parable indicating the repressive futility within this country since the war. . . . For the most part, Ludvik tells his story with a kind of regretful disengagement and defenseless resignation which by no means subdues the effectiveness and the acute projection of the spiritual loss of life behind the curtain. 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)