Book of Laughter and Forgetting
by Milan Kundera · first published 1994
45% recommend55% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Reflective, idea-driven novel that readers return to at different life stages, finding new insights each time; praised as a lifelong favourite and a strong entry point into Kundera's fiction.
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…systems (e.g. human interaction systems). Also helped me to find out what direction I should take after my own book (http://www.nationbydesign.com) Fiction: re-read Milan Kundera's Immortality and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Still lifetime favourites after all these years.
on “Ask HN: What book changed your life in 2013?” ↗_The Book of Laughter and Forgetting_ by _Milan Kundera_. I am taking a break from reading business/self-help/startup related books to read fiction. Milan Kundera is one of my favourite authors.
on “Ask HN: What books are you currently reading?” ↗…each subsequent read at a different point in my life, it’s been interesting to see new insights and perspectives emerge. If you end liking it, another one from Kundera I particularly enjoyed was “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”.
on “So you wanna de-bog yourself” ↗I recommend The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, it’s much better IMO. Not sure why Lightness is more famous, perhaps just the title is more interesting.
on “Milan Kundera, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ Novelist, Dies at 94” ↗Juliette Binoche was perfect in the role. I didn't read the book but I read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. An eye-opener for a young college student.
on “The Unbearable Joy of Sitting Alone in a Café” ↗…or piece of news is memory-holed, banned, or otherwise stigmatized, and then even if evidence and facts show up later, retractions/corrections are rarely made. I remember reading Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting", and I cannot help but have weird vibes given the current zeitgeist, censorship, science arguments from authority vs. backing experiments and data, and the attempted mandating actions of the state. I…
Totalitarian governments were doing this kind of photo editing long before the days of PhotoShop. There's a wonderful story on the first page of Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting", which reads as follows: In February 1948, Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to address the hundreds of thousands of citizens packed into Old…
on “North Korea restores order to funeral with photoshop” ↗…Obscure Sorrows as an art project. I never got the impression that we were supposed to start using these words. It's interesting and entertaining, like when I learned the Czech word "litost" from "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" by Milan Kundera. "Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery." Part five of this book is about Litost, a kind of misery-induced torment only known to the Czech people.…
on “It's not what the world needs right now” ↗"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
on “International Workers' Day” ↗There's a bit about this in _The Book of Laughter and Forgetting_, roughly to the effect that women don't want handsome men, they want men with beautiful consorts.
on “Women Prefer Poaching” ↗…also in his determined ‘erasures’ of past writing, be it private letters, early poetry or inconvenient passages in reissued essays and novels." It occurs to me that there are a couple of stories in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that turn on this. The better match is a story about a man wishing to retrieve letters from a mistress he has broken with and would prefer to regret. One might also count the story about the woman who…
on “The Two Milan Kunderas” ↗