Extract

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

A Czech Communist is airbrushed from a photograph, and all that remains of him is the fur hat he lent to a comrade on a cold balcony. Milan Kundera built this novel in seven parts that circle one another like variations on a fugue, each exploring how power annihilates memory and how laughter, that strange convulsion, can serve either liberation or cruelty. Written in French exile after the Soviet invasion erased Prague's brief spring, the book moves between bedrooms and police states, between bodies and ideologies, insisting that forgetting is the original form of death. It is a work that understands politics as intimately as it understands desire, because both depend on what we choose to remember.