The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Seven linked parts on memory and erasure in occupied Czechoslovakia, where forgetting is something a state can organise.
Seven parts, part novel and part essay, held together by the theme of organised forgetting: a man airbrushed from a photograph, a woman losing her husband’s face. Kundera had been expelled from the Party twice and stripped of citizenship for this book, which is not incidental to what it is about.
Recommended by 1 Person
Timothy Snyder
So he knows what it was like to be on the inside, to have certainty about the rest of the world and to believe that everyone who didn’t share that certainty was a fool. To know where things were going and what you wanted from society – that glowing, overwhelming sense that one is young and the world belongs to you. Kundera really gets that sense across, and I think that’s incredibly important.
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