A review by rissaleighs
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

2.0

Reading this book was much like getting a tooth drilled. Except a tooth drilling is over with mercifully sooner. It would have been a 1-star read for me, except I can't write off the profundity of the author's ideas about memory, laughter, and music. It WAS, at points, an interesting look into Czech culture under communist Russia, and of life under changing political regimes in general. There were passing mentions of statues being torn down and history rewritten which could only pique one's interest given the current news headlines. But in general, I think I would have preferred to read a book of essays by this author on these subjects instead of these stories. The characters and plotlines we're almost uniformly nauseating. Though, that may have been intentional....