Le Livre du rire et de l’oubli

Kundera, like an accomplished musician, creates a series of variations on a single theme: forgetting. “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” he writes, without forgetting that “our only immortality lies in police files,” he adds bitterly. A few years earlier, Kundera, closely watched by the authorities, had left Prague. He first came, discreetly, to teach as an associate professor at the University of Rennes, before settling permanently in France, where he denounced, more clearly than anyone, the destruction of a culture — that “Biafra of the spirit” Aragon had feared when a people is stripped of its memory.

“A summing-up book, the book of maturity. Here is Kundera in full command of his powers, at the height of his lucidity. He grapples with the human condition. It is profound, corrosive, often funny, even sadder still, and closer to Chaplin than to Voltaire. Nothing to do with French-style biting irony. Nothing to do, either, with Manichaeism. What he seeks, what he shows us, is the hidden side of everything […]. It is no accident that this deceptively simple book is as much a triumph of the writer as of the thinker. The Kundera miracle lies in the exact fit, the complete fusion, of thought and the art that conveys it. And if this achievement is unique in the life of a creator, then Kundera has just reached his own summit” (François Wagener, Le Monde, 27 April 1979).