Laughter and Forgetting - a formative work but one that does not stand up well over time

Despite some great moments in Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978, actually that's when he completed the Czech-language original not published till a year later in French), the two concluding sections are absurd and uncomfortable. Despite MK's claims in various interviews, including the interview w/ Philip Roth that's an appendix to the Penguin ed., that he writes about a liberated sexuality and freedom of express no doubt as a counterpoint or antidote to the Soviet control that squashed free thought and expression in his native Czechoslovakia - what are we to make of this? First, an attractive widow, Tamina, who (in an earlier section of this novel that MK describes as variations on a theme) mourns the memory of her late husband and strives to retrieve a packet of her diaries and letters that are all that physically remain of their marriage (easy to see her search for lost letters left behind in Prague as a "variation" on the suppression of literature and writers such as MK in exile trying to recover their works and their identity as writers), now goes off from the bar/coffee shop where she works with a young man who shows up in a sports car, agrees to get into a rowboat w/ a child at the helm, gets transported onto an island populated only by children, is sexually assaulted by the children, tries to swim off the island, drowns. Yes, this could be about a form of exile, about a "writer" who had to relinquish his occupation when placed in a new language-culture, but what about the abusive sexuality? Women continue to come off as objects of desire in MK's fiction - even this "heroine," Tamina, who is throughout a passive victim. The final section involves a couple, Jan and Edwige, in the midst of a long sexual relationship that seems devoid of passion and expression, and we follow them or at least him through various venues, including a free-sex party and finally, in the concluding section of the novel, to a nudist resort. This may be open sexuality - a big topic for literature in the US and Europe in the 1970s, but it's a joyless, loveless sexuality, particularly for the women who, again, are cyphers (to be fair, Jan isn't particular vivid as a character, either). All told, MK was a powerful voice of protest in his time and in Unbearable Lightness his style developed and matured as he brought the narrative together into a single, focused work rather than these "variations," which is to say unrelated fragments, in Laughter & Forgetting - a formative work but one that does not stand up well over time.

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