The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The narrator returns to the image that opened the book: Communist leader Klement Gottwald accepting Clementis’s fur hat on a balcony in Prague. That balcony, the narrator notes, once belonged to a German school attended by Franz Kafka. The narrator recalls Kafka’s description of Prague in The Trial as a “city without memory” (215), a place where even the protagonist cannot remember his past. The narrator says this theme of forgetting runs through Czech life, as successive regimes erase their predecessors by renaming streets, buildings, and squares. On the street where the character Tamina was born, the name changed five times in a single generation. Monuments, too, appeared and vanished. By the 1970s, statues of Lenin dominated, while Stalin had already been discarded. The narrator names Gustav Husak, the final Communist president, the “President of Forgetting” (217) because under his rule historians were silenced, culture was repressed, and memory itself was attacked. The narrator recalls his friend Milan Hübl telling him that the fastest way to destroy a people is to erase their history. Without memory, a nation can be rewritten to suit current rulers.

The narrator discloses that this was a dark time for him personally. His father was dying and was gradually losing his words though his mind remained clear. By the end, his father could only repeat the phrase “that’s strange.” He seemed to be speaking about himself. At the same time, Hübl was arrested and condemned to prison. The dual silences of historian and father preoccupied the narrator. He regretted not speaking more with his father before illness took his speech. His father had been writing about Beethoven’s sonatas, and though the narrator could talk endlessly, he knew little of the subject. In contrast, his father knew everything but could no longer say it. At one point, his father had an epiphany about Beethoven’s variations, but he could not articulate it. The narrator came to think of silence—whether imposed by the regime or by illness—as a fundamental tragedy.

This reflection brings the narrator back to Tamina. Still working in a café in exile, she has grown detached from life, uninterested in customers, and estranged from her friend, Bibi. Then, she suddenly vanishes. Police never solve her disappearance, but the narrator reconstructs her final days. A young man approaches Tamina at the café and speaks to her as no one has since her husband’s death. He tells her she has misunderstood memory: She is really forgetting and cannot forgive herself. He urges her to seek a weightless place, free of the burden of the past. Tamina follows him, entranced, and leaves her old life behind. His name is Raphael, recalling the angel, and he drives her to a remote body of water. There, she recalls her husband’s work as a bulldozer operator in Bohemia. Then, she experiences her own revelation: Memory does not simply return unbidden; one must journey outward to recover it. Yet before she can grasp this fully, Raphael delivers her into the care of a boy who rows her to an island populated only by children. The children assign her to a dormitory group called the Squirrels. Adults are absent, and the children insist she belongs. Tamina, unsettled, realizes too late that she is trapped.

The narrator then digresses on death, recalling Tamina’s husband, Pavel, who died in a hospital at night. His body was dragged away ignominiously, and Tamina feared it would be desecrated. She asked for cremation, seeing death less as transcendence and more as vulnerability. The narrator compares this with Thomas Mann’s tale of a young man visited nightly by a naked woman who personifies death. For the narrator, death is not beautiful but arduous, as he witnessed with his father. He imagines death as a final ride on horseback to a distant place, mirroring Tamina’s drive to the water.

On the island, Tamina initially resists but slowly gives in to life among the children. Her adult body fascinates them, and they surround her with curiosity that turns physical. At first she feels comforted, free from adult sexuality and its burdens of jealousy and loss. But over time, the children’s touches become repetitive and coercive. What the narrator first casts as angelic curiosity devolves into something sordid.

The narrator interweaves this with reflections on music. His father taught him that notes form a royal court, each with a role, and that music is a drama. Later, composers like Schoenberg overthrew this order with the 12-tone system, but like all empires it, too, declined. For the narrator, music’s history has ended and popular forms like rock reduce sound to thoughtless noise. He remembers loudspeakers blaring music during walks with his father, meant to drown thought. His father, despite illness, dismissed this as stupidity. In contrast, he had revered Beethoven and Ellington, music of memory and richness. To the narrator, the rise of “music without memory” suited Husak’s politics of forgetting (249).

Tamina’s misery recalls the narrator’s memories of Husak receiving an honorary kerchief from the Pioneer children. Politicians declared that children “are the future” (257), which the narrator interprets as humanity’s regression into perpetual childhood. Husak urged the children never to look back and to forget history. For the narrator, this was the essence of the regime’s “eternal” values: erasing history to impose timeless obedience. Closing the window on Husak’s propaganda, the narrator joked with his father, and his father laughed for the last time before mounting his horse to death.

Back on the island, the children establish hierarchies based on their participation in games and their hostility grows. When Tamina refuses to play anymore, her once-beloved Squirrels turn against her. Violence erupts; she retaliates but is injured. Soon the children taunt her cruelly, chanting and mocking her adult body. Tamina resists, but eventually the children capture her in nets and beat her. They use her as a scapegoat, sharing their aggression through her. Released but degraded, she realizes she can never belong. Tamina feels the “unbearable absence of weight” (259). She tries to escape by swimming. At first, she makes progress, but after swimming all night, she discovers she is still near the island. Exhausted, she chooses to drown rather than return. As she sinks, the children gather to watch.