The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

In the seven connected sections of this ... novel, different facets of the human comedy are maginified and reduced, reordered and undelrined. We meet seemingly disparate characters: a lonely waitress in exile in a foreign country trying to retrive her left-behind diaries fromher vengeful and senile mother-in-law ... a student who gives up the promise of consummation with a long-pursued mistress for an evenign with a group of poets discussing love ... a borrowed fur cap on the head of a Czech Communist Party hero, all that remains officially of its otherwise expunged and obliterated owner ... two Americn students at a European summer school who, giving an oral report on Ionesco, ascend to heaven ... a flock of ostriches in a zoo who comment profoundly on the nature of writers ... But all of tehm come together in unexpected combinations and unsuspected disguises. And Kundera himself ... appears not only as the author but also as a character in his own fiction, and his autobiography becomes the political history of postwar Czechoslovakia.