The unbearable attitude toward women in Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Milan Kundera's 1979 novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, brought him a wider readership (it was first published in a French translation from the Czech - he was living in political exile in Paris - and later translated into English and published as part of Philip Roth's series introducing Eastern European writers to English-language readers), though it was later overshadowed by his more ambitious (and filmable) book The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Looking back now on L&F (my first time reading it in fact), and hoping it will stand up after 35 years of history - when the Soviet oppression of the Eastern bloc seems a distant memory - yet some elements of the first two sections (if my memory is right, the book could really be seen as a collection of 6 or so long stories/short novels about various young adults in Czechoslovakia under Soviet domination) still feel on point. The first section begins with discussion of a photograph of three Czech leaders waving from a balcony; 1 of them was later rejected by the state and executed, and the picture was "doctored" to remove him from the image (though he'd loaned his cap to one of the other 2 men, and the cap remains). Altering historical images is still a common practice - and easier to do today - the legacy of Orwell still alive in the age of social media. In this novel, the altered image serves as an icon for political oppression under Soviet Rule; the protagonist in this section is a former avid Communist and now somewhat of a dissident - he keeps detailed notes on all of his political meetings - who comes under surveillance. Meanwhile, he focuses on trying to retrieve from a former girlfriend a packet of letters he'd sent her - a mirror image of the state trying to seize records from him. This links Kundera's 2 themes of love/sex and politics, and also his two themes of brutal oppression and gallows humor. Unfortunately, along w/ the 2nd section of L&F, called Mother, which is about a wife who arranges various sex trios so as to keep her husband interested in her and committed to their marriage, we see the flaw in Kundera's writing and thinking that was not so evident to many readers in the 1970s and 80s: He has a degrading attitude toward women (the girlfriend in the first section repeatedly described as ugly) and a male-dominated view of sexual relationships (in the so-called marriage in part 2, the women are totally subservient to the husband's desires; how would it feel to him if the tables were turned and the wife insisted that he share her with another guy?). This sexism lacks the humor and balance of the sex drive in Roth's fiction, and it has not served Kundera's reputation well in the post-Soviet era, as his recent writing has been an id-drive in search of a theme. 

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