The Joke

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A final brief novel, La festa dell’insignificanza (The Festival of Insignificance), appeared in Italian translation in 2013. It divided reviewers when it appeared in English, some praising its crisply elegant humour and others judging that it marked the end of “a series of retreats into mere cleverness”. Well, yes and no. One sympathizes with Mr. Kundera's evident wish not to be type-cast as a ''dissident'' or ''political'' novelist, but the truth is that, even as his books tell love stories and offer meditations The Joke'' is a brilliant, flawed book. Its humor is of a kind more likely to evoke a grimace than a laugh. ''Man,'' writes Mr. Kundera in a new preface, is ''caught in the trap of a joke (and) suffers Mr. Kundera started writing the book in 1962 and three years later submitted it to Czech publishers, aware that its ''spirit ... was diametrically opposed to the official ideology.'' It finally appeared in 1967, becoming a great success

Primul roman al lui Kundera (terminat în decembrie 1965, publicat abia în 1967). Mai puțin eseu decît în celelalte romane. Acțiunea e prilej de meditație, dar reflecțiile personajelor (și numai ale personajelor) se înscriu firesc în desfășurarea evenimentelor, nu sînt excesive și nu fac romanul artificios (precum Insuportabila ușurătate a ființei). Deocamdată, „vocea auctorială” lipsește. In fairness I should add that most critics seem not to have been troubled by this aspect of Mr. Kundera's work. Only one, the British writer D.J. Enright, has felt obliged ''to protest that Kundera humiliates (Helena) savagely, far beyondThe novel plays out like a tense game of chess. Every move is precisely choreographed. Kundera sets the characters off on their journey, then follows them with his camera. And we follow him. Sometimes the work reads like a novelisation of a film or play. It portrays exactly what we see. Not a word is wasted. The above joke is a test of how satisfied men are from their marriages and must never be made in presence of wives, as some husbands have imprudence to laugh on it. But that is the thing about jokes. You don’t ‘make’ something funny, funny is already in air – in form of unhappy husbands (it won’t be funny to kids who know little about marriage), someone just discovers a way to poke at it.

Speaking to Roth in 1980 in the New York Times, Kundera lamented that he felt “the novel has no place” in the world, saying “the totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions”. a profound demoralization. Nobody believes what everyone must say and everyone knows that nobody believes. The fanaticism of the 50's is gone, the ideology of Stalinism has crumbled, but the power of the state remains. No other Misurella, Fred. Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Right in the middle of Prague, Wenceslaus Square, there's this guy throwing up. And this other guy comes along, takes a look at him, shakes his head, and says, 'I know just what you mean.'''Kundera’s first novel, The Joke, seems to grow out of the short-story collection Laughable Loves. They have in common the central device of a “joke”—that is, an intended and performed hoax, a prank—that misfires and, like a boomerang, hurts the perpetrator rather than the intended victim. For example, in one of the stories in Laughable Loves, “I, the Mournful God,” the narrator wants to punish a pretty girl who has resisted his advances by punishing her vanity. He approaches his Greek friend, who acts the role of a foreign impresario attracted by the talent of the girl, who happens to be a music student. The girl is easily seduced, and the affair is consummated the same day on the narrator’s couch, to the narrator’s wrenching and never-ending dismay. Hoist with his own petard, the narrator waxes philosophical about the important lesson he has learned about life.