The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

• Mirek: Central character in Part One. Tracked by state police as a dissident, Mirek is trying ot come to terms with his past relationship with a woman, Zdena.
• Zdena: Former girlfriend of Mirek.
• Marketa: Central character in Part Two. Wife of Karel; invites Karel's mother to stay with them for a few days.
• Karel: Wife of Marketa.
• Karel's mother: Comes to visit Karel and Marketa in Part Two.
• Eva: Very close friend of Marketa and Karel.
• Tamina: Central character in Part Four. A woman who works in a cafe, and wants to retrieve her letters adn diaries left in Prague.
• Bibi: A customer at the cafe where Tamina works; Tamina asks Bibi to retrieve her letters and diaries when she visits Prague.
• Hugo: A customer at the cafe where Tamina works; Hugo befriends Tamina and offers to help her retrieve her letters and diaries.
• Kristyna: Central character in Part Five. Kristyna forms a relationship with a fellow student who exudes "litost."
• Jan: Add a description of this character.
• Lermontov
• Michelle
• Barbara
• Gabrielle
• Clementis
• Mrs. Nora
• Madame Raphael
• Edwige
• Gottwald
• Sarah
• Husak
• Banaka
• Hanna
• Daphnis
• Papa Clevis
• Joujou
• Voltaire: Kristyna's boyfriend's professor.
• Yesenin
• Masturbov
• Beethoven: Referred to describe music as a voyage into infinity
• Verlaine
• Bobby Fischer
• Thomas Mann: An author referred to with reference to the art of writing, especially forusing certain sound to convey silence.
• Pascal
• Eluard
• Passer

Quotes edit see section history

• “That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.”

  The narrator of Part Four

• “The carpenter is the hammer's master, yet it is the hammer that has the advantage over the carpenter, because a tool knows exactly how it should be handled, while the one who handles it can only know approximately how.”

  Narrator

• “........because to understand is to merge and to identify with. That is the secret of poetry. We consume ourselves in the beloved woman, we consume ourselves in the idea we believe, we burn in the landscape we are moved by."”

  Petrarch(imaginary)

• “"Laughter, on the other hand," Petrarch went on, "is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between men and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. that's why I tell you yet again, and want you to keep in mind: boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter."”

  Petrarch(imaginary)

• “Pascal says that man lives between the abyss of the infinitely large and the abyss of the infinitely small. The voyage of variations leads into that other infinitude, into the infinite diversity of the interior world lying hidden in all things. Beethoven thus discovered in variations another area to be explored. His variations are a new `invitation to the voyage.'Variation form is the form in which concentration is brought to its maximum; it enables the composer to speak only of essentials, to go straight to the core of the matter. A theme for variations often consists of no more than sixteen measures. Beethoven goes inside those sixteen measures as if down a shaft leading into the interior of the earth.The voyage into that other infinitude is no less adventurous than the voyage of the epic. It is how the physicist penetrates into the wondrous depths of the atom. With every variation Beethoven moves farther and farther away from the initial theme, which resembles the last variation as little as a flower its image under a microscope.Man knows he cannot embrace the universe with its suns and stars. Much more unbearable is for him to be condemned to lack the other infinitude, that infinitude near at hand, within reach. Tamina lacked the infinitude of her love, I lacked Papa, and all of us are lacking in our work because in pursuit of perfection we go toward the core of the matter but never quite get to it. That the infinitude of the exterior world escapes us we accept as natural. But we reproach ourselves until the end of our lives for lacking that other infinitude. We ponder the infinitude of the stars but are unconcerned about the infinitude our papa has within him.It is not surprising that in his later years variations became the favorite form for Beethoven, who knew all too well (as Tamina and I know) that there is nothing more unbearable than lacking the being we loved, those sixteen measures and the interior world of their infinitude of possibilities.”

  Narrator

• “He loved her as an intelligent, faithful, irreplaceable friend, not as a mistress. But it was impossible to separate mistress from friend.”

  Jan

• “Jan said to himself: At the beginning of one's erotic life, there is arousal without climax, and at the end there is climax without arousal.”

  Jan

• “The woman he had loved most (he was thirty at the time) would tell him (he was nearly in despair when he heard it) that she held on to life by a thread. Yes, she did want to live, life gave her great joy, but she also knew that her "I want to live" was spun from the threads of a spiderweb. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything - love, convictions, faith, history - no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.”

  Jan

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Prague
• Paris
• Rourou
• Austria-Hungary

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• Litost: Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery. (Czech)

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Forgetting: The nature of human forgetting in life, history, politics

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Milan Kundera (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Aaron Asher

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PG5039.21.U6K613
• Dewey: 891.8635

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary

More Books Like This edit see section history

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history