Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980). New York: Penguin, 1986.

A novel written as theme-and-variations, in line with the musical genre. In seven parts, Kundera (as a very present, questioning narrator) posits various relationships among Czechs in the time of their country's ongoing fragility and strife. These relationships are often sexual, usually orgyistic. Sex is treated as a kind of performance of personal freedom and connectivity amid such national decay, even though in the end it never brings people fully together. Likewise, Kundera's seven parts don't ever intersect in that clever way that most novels-as-stories tend to do.

Instead, they each attempt an approach at theme in different ways. That theme is memory, pesonal and collective. Communist leader Gustáv Husák is called "the president of forgetting" (181), and much mining and revising of history is put into the book as mortar between all its little parts. What I found most interesting was its notions of laughter, and that there are two kinds:

Things deprived suddenly of their putative meaning, the place assigned to them in the ostensible order of things [. . .], make us laugh. Initially, therefore, laughter is the province of the Devil. it has a certain malice to it (things have turned out differently from the way they tried to seem), but a certain beneficent relief as well (things are looser than they seemed) [. . .]. (61)

Kundera contrasts this Devil-laughter with the laughter of Angels, which is endowed with contrary meaning, rejoicing in how good everything is, the pure divinity of creation. The Devil finds this laughing itself "infinitely laughable", and that "laughable laughter" is separate from the laughter we all know and love. That "we lack the words to distinguish them" (62) is, for Kundera, one of the tragedies of the contemporary era.