Seven parts, not quite connected, about memory and forgetting in Communist Czechoslovakia. Kundera wrote this after emigrating to France, and the novel moves between fictional characters and meditations on history, on music, on the relationship between politics and personal life. The Communist regime airbrushed people out of photographs; Kundera restores them. The forgetting is systematic; the laughter is resistance. The novel established the pattern of Kundera's later work, mixing essay and story. The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. The novel remembers. It insists that we do too.