Kundera opens this novel with a superb joke. The Czech communist Clematis lends his hat to the party leader Gottwald. Clematis is later removed from history, and all photographs, and all that is left of him is his hat on Gottwald’s head. Kundera is one of the few writers who can simultaneously apply his great intellect, his melancholy and his smile. Never has a such a serious novel been so funny. His character Mirek says: ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’. The rest of the novel is devoted to exploring this hypothesis.
I don’t understand the hostility that many fellow writers seem have for Kundera’s work. In her book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley accuses Kundera of lacking relevance now that Communism has collapsed. I find that attitude staggering. Is she trying to say that his novels are historical novels? She can’t be: that would utterly preposterous. Can she really believe that forgetting ended with the collapse of the wall?
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is, to my mind, the first of a great trilogy of novels (the books that complete it are The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, the last three that Kundera wrote in his native Czech). All three are broken into seven parts, and in all three he takes an explicitly analytical approach to his themes and characters. The authorial voice is always there, dipping in with ironic commentary, happy to laugh at anyone and everything. Contrary to many readers, I find Kundera’s authorial voice enlivening, elegant, spirited and, in places, thrilling. Every word he uses is indispensable, every sentence perfectly crafted, every aspect of his work under control. But it never seems artificial; in fact it’s almost as if he’s just bringing his discoveries to our attention, the discoveries of a life spent contemplating.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is playful in the extreme. There is surely no greater compliment to Kundera than the one paid to him by his great novelist colleague Carlos Fuentes: ‘I think of Kundera as the great modern descendant of Kafka and Gogol’. His writing is strange, as both those great forebears’ writing was strange. Take this:
“This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like various stages of a voyage heading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought, the interior of a single, unique situation the understanding of which recedes from my sight into the distance. It is a book about laughter and about forgetting, about forgetting and about Prague, about Prague and about the angels.”
Now you could, perhaps legitimately, say that this is pretentious. Or, you could let it infect your soul and your intellect, let Kundera play, and delight in watching him as he does so. I think it’s a privilege to be able to do so.
Surely Kundera is the greatest living novelist, and it’s absolutely inexplicable that he has been overlooked for the Nobel prize. I can’t recommend his work highly enough, and this novel is one of his very greatest.
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