Thoughts on how to classify Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting

It's really hard to get a grasp on Milan Kundera's 1979 novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, in that, among other things, it's a book not easy to classify. Yes, I suppose it's a novel, though each of its 8 or so sections stands as a story and the connections across the sections are thematic rather that structural (i.e., other than the author himself, characters do not - yet - appear in more than one story). What type of novel? Kundera is or was a devotee of several of the literary movements of his most creative period, among them postmodernism (various references to himself and to the art of writing), magic realism (not a huge part of this work, but there are elements, such as when the teacher and two students take hands and dance in a circle and rise above the ground), sexual liberation (many sex scenes and a groundbreaking frankness about sexual drive and feelings, though dominated too much by male fantasy and misunderstanding - you can see how he and Roth, who brought K to the attention of English-language readers, had much in common for better or worse), free-form writing (an influence from the East and from psychedelia - the novel is dead, break all conventions, write in short takes, jump around in time, etc.). Ultimately what stands apart today and what draws me most to this complex work (multiple readings advised, though I'm not sure I'll do so) is the politics: Behind all of the sturm and drang is a story about exile. The strongest sections are those that describe the Czech surveillance on suspicious citizens, particularly writers, the entrapment of Kundera (not sure how true to life this section is) who had been banned from writing and who secretly wrote an astronomy column of all things - when he's caught both he and the young woman who'd been editing his column, pay the price). Though K landed on his feet, so to speak, w/ a good teaching job in France and literary success in Fr. translation, the pain of exile is evident throughout this work, a continuous subtext - in one powerful section a woman in exile is desperate to get her hands on a packet of letters she had left behind in Prague, and goes through several degrading steps, including sexual subjugation, in this futile attempt to re-gain her lost past. Many powerful scenes in this book, and the overall theme is well-stated in the title: ways to deal with trauma, make light of it or lock it away; interested to see whether the various strands do tie together, even loosely, by the end.

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