TM

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Rating

7.5/10 When I was somewhere midway through this book I was going to give it a 6/10. It was interesting to read but I wasn’t eager to keep coming back to it. Each time I eventually picked it up, I had to give myself a little mental pep-talk “read a bit again, it’s not that bad”. But after going through this routine for some hundred and fifty pages, I realized I am constantly thinking about the ideas hidden in this book. They are subtle little life’s philosophies that at face value seem like simple, borderline obvious statements about our everyday existence. But this is precisely why I kept thinking about their meaning - they simply kept reoccurring in my everyday existence.

At some point, Kundera talks about how in every conversation all we do is merely acknowledge what the other person had said and then immediately start talking about ourselves - in connection to what they just said, but more likely than not, about something that relates to us, not them. It was this idea that I kept recognizing everywhere around me. In my own conversations and in the conversations of others. Most people, most of the time simply talk about themselves; to each other but not about the other. The book is full of observations like this. Observations about remembering, forgetting, laughing, having sex, interacting with each other, tormenting ourselves with our own thoughts, and about living completely ordinary lives. It’s like a philosophy book of how it is to live a completely ordinary life; but written in a form of short stories intertwined with author’s explicit comments and thoughts about the imagined lives of his characters.

The book is weird and different than anything I read before. The author both trusts the reader that they will understand the metaphors and analogies he hides in his short stories, and doesn’t trust that they will understand it all so he explains in a first person voice. Ultimately, if you find yourself agreeing with and recognizing the little life’s wisdoms, observations, and unspoken truths you will enjoy this “novel in the form of variations” - and you will also more deeply appreciate the quote from the book that’s on the back cover.

Synopsis

At the top of the back cover is a quote from the book. The quote sounds very mysterious, vague and incomprehensible. But in its essence it’s a great synopsis of this book. It both captures what the book is about and how it’s written. You will appreciate it more after you read the book. So I’ll simply repeat it here to not spoil the feeling:

“This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought, the interior of a single, unique situation the understanding of which recedes from my sight into the distance. It is a book about laughter and about forgetting, about forgetting and about Prague, about Prague and about angels.”

Notes

  • “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” (p. 2)
    • when the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia started the Russians got rid of the former traditional culture, statues, songs, poems, TV channels, customs, art in an attempt to erase the memory and induce collective forgetting so they can establish their own system of power
  • “At a time when history still made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgetting overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator’s tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the overfamiliar banality of private life.” (p. 10)
    • I love this quote and I hate the news cycle. I wish the everyday life was slower, filled with less anxiety, and focused on our private lives rather than on constantly watching someone or something else unfold before our eyes - I want more doing and being, less watching and desiring
  • “Destiny has no intention of lifting a finger for Mirek, whereas Mirek is ready to do everything for his destiny. He felt responsible for his destiny, but his destiny did not feel responsible for him.”
    • we create our own destinies in our own heads. Emphasis on own. And we are often ready to die for them, or if not die, than compromise other aspects of our lives for their sake
  • “What he always found most interesting about a woman while making love was her face. The movements of the two bodies seemed to be unwinding a long reel of film, projecting on the woman’s face, as on a television screen, a captivating movie filled with turmoil, expectations, explosions, pain, cries, emotion, and evil.” (p. 265)
    • this is beautifully put! And the book is full of vivid little descriptions like this one about completely ordinary things that one might have thought about but never expressed out loud or in this depth of beauty
  • laughter is a peculiar thing. I never though about it the way Kundera describes it in this book. I always saw laughter as a pure expression of joy, as the fundamental release of emotions and endorphins expressed in the form of bodily convulsions accompanied by grimacing. But Kundera sees it as a kind of border between order and disorder. He describes it as both the domain of angles and the domain of devils. It’s an act of human existence that we take part in both when we feel genuine joy but also when we feel spite, mischief or malevolence. It’s an expression of being human that can both make or break the moment
  • as for the forgetting part, it’s a shame that our brain makes false memories in the first place. In that light, forgetting false memories doesn’t seem such a shame. But those memories are all we have in absence of technology, so whether they are truthful or not, forgetting is a painful act of losing the people, places and activities we once found very meaningful