Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
The suicide of a wealthy elderly man soon proves to be improbable. The perceptive policeman tirelessly searches for the real reasons for the strange death, which will lead him to the mysterious house under Petrin. The mysteries and motives increase as the hours spent with the young widow increase. The main characters are three, perhaps four women, educated, bold and devoted to a higher justice, according to which the victim and the culprit lose their original duality. And the burning question echoes: how much more violence and wars await us before all this human misfortune finally becomes huma... continue