Volume 28, Number 1 · February 5, 1981
The Cold Comedian
By Robert M. Adams
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
by Milan Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim
Knopf, 228 pp., $10.95
The analogy of musical form is a beguiling siren for literary artists, and the rocks are white with their bones. Milan Kundera, a Czech writer in exile, is a virtuoso both of music and of fiction, and he has the talent, more unusual still, of controlling the freedoms he assumes. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a seven-part invention of immense wit, intelligence, and verve. Symphonic it isn't; but in the genre of literary chamber music, it's a remarkable achievement.
Review, 2070 words
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