The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera is a whimsically ironic fiction that unnecessarily advertises itself as a novel. Its parts are lightly interrelated, as are some of its characters, but each functions well on its own, sometimes lamenting and mocking Czechoslovakia’s fate under communist rule, sometimes doing the same vis-a-vis life in exile from Czechoslovakia, sometimes embracing and renouncing the absurdities of bourgeois morality, especially with regard to sex. Kundera deploys his characters swiftly and then twirls them around, bends them over, takes off their clothes, steals their love letters, gets them drunk, and inhabits their dreams […]