The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

published	January 1994 by Perennial
first published	2001
binding	Paperback
isbn	006099701X (isbn13: 9780060997014)
ebook
pages	256
description	In one of the finer modern ironies of the life-imitates-art sort, the country that Kundera seemed to be writing about when he talked about Czechoslova...more [close] In one of the finer modern ironies of the life-imitates-art sort, the country that Kundera seemed to be writing about when he talked about Czechoslovakia is, thanks to the latest political redefinitions, no longer precisely there. This kind of disappearance and reappearance is, partly, what Kundera explores in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In this polymorphous work -- now a novel, now autobiography, now a philosophical treatise -- Kundera discusses life, music, sex, philosophy, literature and politics in ways that are rarely politically correct, never classifiable but always original, entertaining and definitely brilliant. [close]
date added	05-27-07 edit book

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Kirsten added it (review of isbn 0060932147)

08/12/08

Read in August, 2008

"slowing down, he started to look at the scenery. actually, he had never before looked at the scenery. he had always driven toward a goal, to arrange or discuss something, and for him the world's space had become a negative, a waste of time, an obstacle slowing down his activity."

"they shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. the future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, ...more "slowing down, he started to look at the scenery. actually, he had never before looked at the scenery. he had always driven toward a goal, to arrange or discuss something, and for him the world's space had become a negative, a waste of time, an obstacle slowing down his activity."

"they shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. the future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. we want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past."

"that is when i understood the magical meaning of the circle. if you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. a row is an open formation. but a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. it is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. like a meteorite broken off from a planet, i left the circle and have not yet stopped falling. some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others are smashed at the end of their fall. and these others (i am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles."

"we write books because our children aren't interested in us. we address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them. you might say that the taxi driver is not a writer but a graphomaniac. so we need to be precise about our concepts. a woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac. she is a lover. but my friend who makes photocopies of his love letters to publish them someday is a graphomaniac. graphomania inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions: 1) an elevated level of general well-being; 2) a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals; 3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. but by backlash, the effect affects the cause. general isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation. the invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. in the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside."

"the irresistible proliferation of graphomania shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: we are all writers! for everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. one morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived."

"she realized what gave her written memories their meaning and worth was that they were intended for her alone. as soon as they lost that quality, the intimate tie binding her to them would be cut, and she would be able to read them no longer with her own eyes but only with the eyes of the readers perusing a document about some other person. then even she who had written them would become for her some other person, an outsider. the striking similarity that would nonetheless remain between her and the author of the notes would have the effect of parody, of mockery, no, she would never be able to read her notes if they had been read by outsiders."

"she held on to life by a thread. yes, she did not want to live, life gave her great joy, but she also knew that her 'i want to live' was spun from the threads of spiderweb. it takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything - love, convictions, faith, history - no longer has meaning. the whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter."...less

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