The Book of Laughter & Forgetting

milan kundera aaron asher

Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.

Genres fictionczech literatureclassicsliteraturenovelsphilosophyshort storiesliterary fictioncontemporary20th century

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,1979

Literary awards

los angeles times book prize,

Places

prague (praha),

This edition

Format: 240 pages, Hardcover
Published: August 1, 1996 by Borgo Pr
ISBN: 9780809592012
ASIN: 0809592010
Language: English

Characters More characters

Mirek

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Znedna

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Tamina

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Vladimír Clementis

Vladimír "Vlado" Clementis (1902 - 1952) was a Slovak politician, lawyer, publicist, literary critic, author and a prominent member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Between 1948 and 1950, he served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia. In ...

About the author

milan kundera

Milan Kundera (1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Czech and French novelist. He went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.

Kundera wrote in Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; people therefore consider these original works as not translations. He is best known for his novels, including The Joke (1967), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), all of which exhibit his extreme though often comical skepticism.