Broken Circles

By Paul Gray

THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING by Milan Kundera Translated by Michael Henry Heim Knopf; 228 pages; $10.95

Czechoslovakia's Communist government responded to the publication of this book in Europe last year by revoking the citizenship of Author Milan Kundera. The act was largely symbolic and gratuitous; Kundera had left his repressive homeland and settled in France in 1975. In their own thuggish way, though, the Czech authorities showed they were onto something when they bridled at Kundera's latest work. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is deeply and impressively subversive, in more ways than one. Kundera not only raps the iron knuckles of totalitarianism; he coolly unravels the velvet glove of liberalism.

The seven stories in this volume sometimes share titles (two are called Lost Letters, two The Angels). They all revolve around a small set of preoccupations: the burden of the past and the limits of the healing power of laughter. Time is measured back and forth from the year 1968, when the growing freedom of the Czech people, the fabled Prague Spring, was crushed by the Soviets: "Russian tanks invaded Bohemia." Recent history was revised downward, and those who had been prominent in pushing reforms (including Kundera) found themselves officially erased into nonpersons. Observes one character: "The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past."

Kundera's people face a shared dilemma. Should they try to remember, when the memories of happier times only mock the bleak, estranged present? Would it not be more sensible to shrug off the past, to laugh it away? No simple answers emerge.

A man named Mirek tries to retrieve and destroy the love letters he sent a mistress of his youth. He wants to obliterate the fact that he ever loved such an ugly woman. He is, in fact, unconsciously aping the Czech rulers who are persecuting him; he feels "an uncontrollable urge, an urge to reach far back into the past and smash it with his fist, an urge to slash the canvas of his youth to shreds."

On the other hand, a woman named Tamina works to recover old letters and diaries for the opposite reason. The memory of her late husband is deserting her.

Old papers might provide "reference points in the flow of time." As things now stand, she can only recall her husband's face when she considers sleeping with an other man. The vision keeps her faithful to the dead.

A progressive sensibility might take pity on Tamina's situation and try to liberate her from her neuroses. Kundera is not so sure. In a second story, Tamina is rescued from her job as a waitress and taken to a mystical island full of charming, promiscuous children. They have no memories, and she gradually sinks into their condition. Then she drowns. "Circle dancing is magic," Kundera writes, pointing out the allure of the group to isolated souls. An image recurs several times in these stories: people join hands, laughing and singing, and ascend slowly heavenward. The author portrays all movements, crusades, organized religions and political parties as extended circle dances. "I too once danced in a ring," Kundera writes, describing how he joined the Communist Party in 1948. His expulsion shortly there after taught him something: "Leave a row and you can always go back to it.

The row is an open formation. But once a circle closes, there is no return."

Not all of Kundera's characters are outsiders by choice, but all are barred from the consolations of groupthink. They cringe at shared beliefs: "The best of all possible progressive ideas is the one which is provocative enough so its supporters can feel proud of being different, but popular enough so the risk of isolation is precluded by cheering crowds confident of victory." Kundera's men find the messianic earnestness of an orgy either frightening or funny. They do not believe that indiscriminate sex or any other contemporary anodyne will save them. They live perilously close to what Kundera calls "the border," the psychological line "beyond which everything loses meaning: love convictions, faith, history."

Kundera's fiction flirts with that border without crossing it. His condemnation of modern life is broad, but his sympathy for those who create and suffer it is deep This work is indeed what its title states and something more: a book of mourning and remembrance.

-- By Paul Gray

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