The Record of Laughter and Forgetting

Le livre du rire et de l'oubli

“Jokes are a barrier between people and the world.”
The Struggle Between Memory and Forgetting: Kundera's Astrology. "Laughter and Forgetting" is Milan Kundera's representative novel and his first full-length novel after leaving the Czech Republic and settling in France. "This is a novel about Tamina, and when Tamina isn't on screen, it's a novel for Tamina. She is the central character and the primary audience, and all the other stories are variations on her own, converging into her life as if reflected in a mirror." Tamina, originally from Prague, works as a waitress in a small café in a western European city. After her husband's death, she lives alone, quiet and peaceful, yet she mobilizes her friends and devotes herself to others, doing everything she can to retrieve the eleven notebooks and letters she left at her mother-in-law's house in Prague. Husband, mother, homeland... the past becomes Tamina's salvation. "If the rickety structure of memories collapses like an unstable tent, all that remains for Tamina is the present, this invisible point, this nothingness slowly advancing towards death." Tamina, who longs to retrieve her eleven notebooks, and Mirek, who seeks his twenty-five-year-old love letter... Kundera, drawing from his own circumstances, writes about those who resist forgetting and stubbornly cling to memories. What people wish to preserve or forget, like laughter tinged with joy and irony, is a corresponding and enduring theme. "This is a novel about laughter and forgetting."
★"Laughter and Forgetting" is Kundera's first novel after he left his country and hometown. It means a new start in his creative career and marks a new beginning of Kundera's career as a novelist. It is a masterpiece that combines his own experience and thinking, themes and techniques. It is a novel that Kundera himself attaches great importance to. He thought his writing career was about to end, and this book made him realize that he "is writing something completely different" and discovered a new artistic path. Kundera bluntly said that the heroine Tamina in the book is "the woman I care about most in all my works."
★ The central theme of "The Record of Laughter and Forgetting" is memory and forgetting, it is time, it is the moments we want to capture in the passing of time, it is the traces we want to leave behind as we keep walking. This is a topic that is closely related to each of us.
★"The whole book is a novel in the form of variations." Different parts and scenes are intertwined and connected, with an inner theme running through them. "Variation" has become Kundera's signature writing form since "Laughter and Forgetting". The author himself also jumps in and out of the plot of the novel. In other words, the novel incorporates essays and fables, which has become a writing technique that is deeply characteristic of Kundera.
★ Winning work of the Lu Xun Literary Award and Literary Translation Award.

2022-09-01

上海译文出版社

356

9787532789894