The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

"The basic event of the book is the story of totalitarianism, which deprives people of memory and thus retools them into a nation of children."

This being said; the only persons who retain their identity among the erasure campaign of totalarianism are those who retain their memories.

The heroine of Kunderas book is the tortued Tamina; who in yearning to keep her recollections of her dead husband alive within her mind hearkens to the situation of Czechloslovakian culture and identity as a whole. Tamina tries in vain to re enter Prague to regain her journals which entail her everyday former life with her husband and their various holidays. The journals stay locked away in the chest of drawers under the prying eyes of her mother. These memories are the

Such is the dilemma of not only the people of Czechloslovakia after Russian occupation but for all who live under totalitarian control."

"In the course of a mere half- century, it (Central Europe/Czechloslovakia) experienced democracy, fascism, revolution, Stalinist terror as well as the disintegration of Stalinism, German and Russian occupation, mass deportations, the death of the West in its own land."

In the chapter of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting titled Mama; kundera emphasizes a theme that repeats itself many times as an indictment to memory. Mama is like so many others that are losing touch with their selves as they forget their past. Her being once a imposing figure to Marketa she was becoming feeble and childlike in her forgetting. She cannot recall which one of the many rulers of the Czechloslovakian people she sang her patriotic song for. This is a problem of identity that Kundera is quick to point out;

connection Tamina has to her identity. The longer they remain locked away from her the harder it is to remember her husbands face and the life she had. The Russians sought to do the same to the people of Czechloslovakia in order to make them forget who they were. Kundera comments on the campaign as follows:

Some topics in this essay:
Forgetting Kundera, Czechloslovakia Russian, Franz Kafka, Laughter Forgetting, Mirek Kunderas, Mirek Zdena, Soon Russian, Prague Spring, Twenty Mirek, , russian occupation, book laughter forgetting, russian tanks, child kundera, book laughter, laughter forgetting, people czechloslovakia, kunderas book, unmasks metaphysics, czechloslovakia russian, private life, czechloslovakia russian occupation,