A novel of various stories with a common theme – laughter and forgetting. As with other Kundera novels the character’s story is interrupted with his reasons for assigning certain traits and outcomes, his real life inspiration and explanations to help us understand his message.
Lost Letters provides us with two stories, one set in Czechoslovakia and the other with a background in Czechoslovakia. Mirek is trying to find the love letters he wrote to Zdena and is traveling with compromising papers in his car and being trailed by the authorities as he drives to confront her. By obtaining the letters and destroying them it would ‘slash the painting portraying his youth’. He is unsuccessful in obtaining the letters and is ultimately caught by the authorities.
Tamina has left a parcel of love letters with her in-laws in Prague and wants to retrieve them as since her husband has passed away she remembers the things that they did together less and less. She won’t return to Prague herself and relies on two friends to help her, both of whom let her down.
The sequence where Tamina is taken to the island with the children was rather disturbing. Kundera’s characters seem to have liberal sex lives with various partners but involving children in an semi erotic situation such as this was uncomfortable to read…. whether it is considered art or not.
Mama is a singular story about a self centered domineering woman who mellows with age and relates a story to her son and daughter in law during a visit about when she read a poem as a child at school. But her time frame is wrong and when this is pointed out to her she finds herself distressed that her memory has played tricks on her and alters the story to cover her mistake.
The Angels centres more on the laughter, and the sequence with the two girls and their teacher being lifted off their feet and vanishing through the ceiling was reminiscent of 100 Years of Solitude!
The other stories were Litost and The Border..
This books main theme is about forgetting Prague and the angels , with all stories apparently being a variation of Tamina’s own story, written about her and for her.
Kundera is obviously very fond of his native Czechoslovakia but also bitter about what happened to him as a writer. Kafta wrote that Praque was a city without a memory. The streets do not know their names, they are constantly changing, monuments are torn down after the Czech Reformation, the introduction of the Czech Republic, the Communists, and the war.
Gustav Husak was the 7th President and called the President of Forgetting. Kundera says that the people forget, but the world at large forgets even faster. His own father was inflicted by an illness that caused him to forget words until he ended up in a world of silence before he died.
There is a lot of pain in the book, but he has managed to lighten it with his own brand of humour. The poets dinner for example, and his usual (very human) scenarios involving miscommunication.
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