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    A Study Guide for Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"
    A Study Guide for Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"
    A Study Guide for Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"
    Ebook45 pages32 minutes

    A Study Guide for Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    A Study Guide for Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535835473
    A Study Guide for Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"

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      A Study Guide for Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" - Gale

      08

      The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

      Milan Kundera

      1979

      Introduction

      In 1978, while exiled in France, the Czechoslovakian writer Milan Kundera wrote a novel destined to become an international success. Forbidden to be published in his homeland, Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was written in Czech but first published in French as Le livre du rire et de l'oublie in 1979. It was subsequently translated into English and published in the United States in 1980.

      Although the book is generally classified as a novel, it does not have the traditional structure of beginning, middle, and end. Rather, the seven parts of the book have individual characters and different plot lines. Yet The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is more than a collection of connected short stories. Indeed, the separate sections do not even correspond to the traditional notions regarding short stories. Rather, they are snippets of a story interspersed with historical commentary interspersed with philosophical meditation interspersed with autobiographical detail. What holds the entire work together is the compellingly controlled voice of the narrator, a voice that remains consistent throughout the text. This voice, Kundera himself (or a character playing the part of Milan Kundera), gradually reveals to the reader the themes and variations that comprise the novel.

      The historical context of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is important for any reader approaching the text. From an exile's perspective, Kundera writes of his nation's descent from a republic to a Communist dictatorship, its brief resurgence as an open society during the Prague Spring of 1968, and the country's return to a totalitarian police state, after Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in August 1968, reestablishing Czechoslovakia as a Communist Eastern-bloc nation.

      The Book of Laughter and Forgetting explores the ways that governments and people both create and extinguish memories, how laughter can be both angelic and demonic, and what is required to remain human in the face of crushingly dehumanizing circumstances.

      A recent edition of the novel, translated from French by Aaron Asher, was published by Perennial Classics in 1996.

      Author Biography

      Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). His parents were Ludvik and Milada Kunderová. His father was a well-known musician who studied with the famous Czech composer, Leos Janácek. Indeed, his father's musical influence can be seen in many of Kundera's later works.

      In 1948, Kundera completed secondary school and enrolled in Charles University in Prague. He began his studies in literature, later changing his emphasis to film and directing. He joined the Communist Party in 1948 as an idealistic youth; he quickly became disillusioned, however, as the Party quickly established a police state. An outspoken critic of the Party, he was

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