The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“He had no desire to go on with his trip.”

Mirek’s statement reveals the difficulty of confronting the past. He would like to forget Zdena, and he would like others to forget his association with Zdena, but the journey to her apartment brings that relationship into greater focus. This journey becomes a symbol of the painful process of remembering.

“When he left her, her only desire was to show that faithfulness was a value superior to all others.”

The narrator describes how Mirek has always had the wrong impression of Zdena and her faithfulness. Mirek’s failure of judgment makes his memory less reliable, showing that his version of events may not be trustworthy since he is basing them on false premises. Mirek is, in effect, an unreliable narrator of his own past.

“Mirek rewrote history just like the Communist Party, like all political parties, like all peoples, like mankind.”

Part 1 opens with a depiction of the government’s concerted effort to erase and substitute the past. This is shown to be futile, and the novel itself is testament to the way in which memory can organize against such erasure. Yet Mirek, a supposed critic of the government and someone who deliberately clings to the memories the state would prefer him to forget, is equally keen to rewrite his own past. This parallel shows that personal vanity and authoritarian control share the same impulse, highlighting the politics of memory and erasure.

“They reproached her: Everyone else is thinking about tanks, and you’re thinking about pears.”

Karel mocks his mother for thinking about pears when tanks are rolling into Czechoslovakia, yet he has come to appreciate her perspective of focusing on small pleasures. Mama, however, remembers only the sting of the reproach. This exacerbates Mama’s feeling of isolation, and she remains estranged in her memory.

“Marketa let herself be made love to by this mechanical male body, then watched that body flinging itself between Eva’s legs, but she tried not to see the face, so as to think of it as a stranger’s body.”

Sex from Marketa’s perspective shows the extent to which she dehumanizes Karel during the act. She reduces him to a “mechanical male body” that is present only to elicit a desired physical reaction. In contrast, she names Eva, which is a mark of the emotional bond the women share. Furthermore, she actively tries to alienate herself from Karel to emphasize her bond with Eva, highlighting the theme of The Instability of Love, Desire, and Intimacy.

“That beauty is an abolition of chronology and a rebellion against time.”

Karel uses his memory of Mrs. Nora to spark his renewed interest in his wife. By comparing Eva to Mrs. Nora, he is rejuvenated by a sense of sexual nostalgia. This allows him to overcome time itself through memory, just as memory is used elsewhere in the book to overcome the imposition of the state. This highlights the theme of the politics of memory and erasure.

“Literature is made up of signs.”

The literary analysis offered by the two young students is an ironic meta-commentary on the novel itself. On one level, it mocks the students’ simplistic analysis. On the other hand, it reflects the novel’s awareness of its symbolic structure. It highlights the novel’s Postmodern style as it is commenting on its own composition, and the act of interpretation becomes part of the story.

“Soon after the Russians occupied my country in 1968, I was driven from my job (like thousands upon thousands of other Czechs), and no one had the right to give me another.”

In Part 3 of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the narrator most explicitly blurs the lines between the narrator as a character and Milan Kundera as an author. The narration slips into the first person as the narrator expands on Kundera’s experiences in the first person. At the same time, this description of personal struggle is not unique, as he states that was thousands of other Czechs endured the same fate.

“Don’t worry. Someone who spent three years in Moscow studying Marxism-Leninism wouldn’t dare admit he had his horoscope cast.”

The man who spent years studying Marxism-Leninism secretly asks the narrator for a horoscope, suggesting that those who have been educated by the communist regime do not personally believe the official doctrine. The hypocrisy ironically offers protection to a dissident like the narrator because the person who commissioned the horoscope cannot admit to doing so.

“Whenever she sat facing a man, she would use his head as material for sculpture: gazing intently at him, she would imagine remaking the contours of the face, giving him a darker complexion and putting warts and freckles on it, reducing the ears’ size, coloring the eyes blue.”

Tamina invents a technique to slow the fragmentation of her memory. She imposes the face of her dead husband on any man who sits opposite her, and while this helps to keep her memory of her husband alive, it has the effect of creating distance between herself and the present. The verbs—“remaking,” “reducing,” “coloring”—highlight the artificiality of her process, as she approaches men as if she were sculpting from clay rather than interacting with them.

“People would sometimes tell her what they thought about her country, but they were not at all interested in her experiences.”

Tamina is constantly reminded that, while in exile, she is not permitted to be the author of her own identity. Instead, she has an identity thrust upon her by people who do not know her homeland as well as she does but who feel entitled to their opinions. The blunt phrasing—“not at all interested”—conveys the force of their dismissal, and this quote emphasizes Exile and the Fragmentation of Identity.

“And you all know what the bicycle signifies in my work. It’s a symbol.”

The writer’s pompous declaration satirizes empty literary talk and highlights his arrogance. The moment also functions as metafiction as it acknowledges the significance of symbols in storytelling while also denying readers any real insight into the symbolism of the bicycle. The narrator, framing this discussion but absenting himself from the dialogue, is providing a wry commentary on himself and his narration.

“It crossed her mind that she could no longer visualize her husband’s genitals and pubic thatch, that the memory of revulsion is therefore stronger than the memory of tenderness.”

When Tamina has sex with Hugo, his bad breath prevents her from escaping into her grieving memories. The sensory intrusion of his breath interrupts her tendency to impose her dead husband’s image on those around her. Hugo’s revolting presence disrupts and disintegrates her cherished memories, deepening her feeling of guilt because she can no longer picture her husband’s most private parts. Her immediate revulsion is more powerful and more disruptive than the tenderness she wants to remember.

“For Kristyna vaguely imagined that by giving her body to the student she would lower their affair to the butcher’s or the mechanic’s level and she would never again hear a word about Schopenhauer.”

Kristyna fears that sex would “lower” her relationship with the student by reminding her of how similar he is to other men. She worries that he will seem just like the other men in her life—the “butcher” and the “mechanic”—by stripping their relationship of the intellectual glamour. She values the student’s intellectual posturing—like his discussions of Schopenhauer—more than his body.

“The word ‘proud’ was another that came from his mouth in italics.”

The narrator’s phrasing draws specific attention to the act of narration. By mentioning the typography with which the dialogue is presented, the narrator acknowledges that the dialogue is being read, not heard, thus emphasizing the disconnect between the characters and the audience. The audience is reminded of the narrator’s presence as a vector between the audience and the characters, heightening the pervasive tension between fiction and memory.

“The story of the Czechs—an endless story of rebellions against the stronger, a succession of glorious defeats that launched their history and led to ruin the very people who had done the launching—is a story of litost.”

The word litost allows the narrator to delve further into the history of Czechoslovakia. Such a distinct word is not merely a product of the communist regime which has dominated the recent history of the country. Instead, the Czech identity—which is so tied up in this untranslatable word—is born out of humiliation and defiance. The regime may seem totalitarian, but it is merely the latest expression of a historical national identity.

“Petrarch immediately read Lermontov the text of Kristyna’s message, read it several times in a row in a sonorous, melodic voice as if it were verse.”

When he picks up the message from Kristyna, Petrarch recontextualizes her words by reading them aloud as if they were verse. In doing so, he transforms a short note into a poem. For the student, this recontextualization momentarily reduces his humiliation by placing his experiences within a literary tradition. The past is not being rewritten, but it is being placed in a new and transformative context.

“Gottwald, Clementis, and all the others were unaware even that Kafka had existed, but Kafka had been aware of their ignorance. In his novel, Prague is a city without memory.”

Kafka was not celebrated as a literary figure in his lifetime. After his death, however, his work took on new significance and was widely praised. The phrase “a city without memory” casts Prague as a place where historical figures are overlooked until they are politically useful.

“This book is a novel in the form of variations.”

The narrator’s declaration addresses the structure of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The metaphor of musical variations suggests repetitions with some differences. These seven stories are united by the themes of memory, exile, and intimacy, though each story presents them in new ways and through new characters.

“She has become the cement of their brotherhood.”

By describing Tamina as “the cement of their brotherhood,” the narrator casts her suffering as a force that binds the children together. She becomes the focal point for their pent-up frustrations, which is as fundamental to their community as the cement is to a construction project. This dehumanization echoes how authoritarian states use scapegoats to inspire solidarity.

“They were just staring at her, wide-eyed and eager, watching her.”

The children watch Tamina passively as she drowns, and they do nothing to intervene. They simply stare at her suffering with mild interest. The attitude of the children invites readers to think of their own relationship with the novel. They, too, have just witnessed the suffering of Tamina (and the rest of the Czech people). Tamina’s fate asks the question of whether suffering in this manner can simply function as spectacle rather than inspiring change or accountability.

“He had contrived a caricature of Edwige as lover that now stood as a barrier between them, preventing him from reaching the real Edwige, her senses and her shrouded obsceneness.”

Jan is becoming increasingly alienated from Edwige because he has created a version of her in his mind that stands between them. This breakdown in communication speaks to the broad sense of alienation and isolation throughout the novel. This shows how desire prevents authentic connection by projecting fictions onto real people, and it exemplifies the theme of the instability of love, desire, and intimacy.

“Just as the blackbird invasion took place on the reverse side of Europe’s history, so my story takes place on the reverse side of Jan’s life.”

The blackbird story invites the audience to view the world from a different perspective, reminding the audience that the idea of a single objective reality is rejected by Postmodernism. The narrator explicitly frames Jan’s life in this manner, using Jan’s subjective reality to inform the audience about the narrator’s subjective reality. Neither one is true or objective in the traditional sense, but their ability to reflect and refract through one another provides the audience with a better understanding of the problems facing Czechoslovakia.