The Joke

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I could see nothing but actors, their faces covered by masks of cretinous virility and arrogant brutishness; I found no extenuation in the thought that the masks hid another (more human) face, since the real horror seemed to lie in the fact that the faces beneath the masks were fiercely devoted to the inhumanity and coarseness of the masks." For me this is a re-read and re-reading books is something I’ve been doing and enjoying just lately and which I plan to continue doing. Although I’ve read and re-read most of Kundera’s books, at least up to Immortality, The Joke was one that I kept meaning to re-read but never quite got round to it. My reluctance was in part because I didn’t enjoy my first reading that much; I remember it being a bit bland, but this was after reading his later books. However, I’ve really enjoyed re-reading it and my (relatively) lower opinion of it was a bit unfair. I think now I would say it stands up there with his other works – no problem. to work as a penal laborer in the mines. On his occasional leaves from the mines, Ludvik has a frustrated love affair with a frightened, almost speechless girl named Lucie. It comes, like everything else in his life, to nothing. Indeed, for all his insistence on the need to preserve the distinctiveness of central European nations, Kundera was sceptical of the very idea of a “home” or a “homeland”. “I wonder if our notion of home isn’t, in the end, an illusion, a myth,” he suggested in an interview. “I wonder if we are not victims of that myth. I wonder if our ideas of having roots – d’être enraciné – is simply a fiction we cling to.” their shared humiliation. Some of Mr. Kundera's characters develop a hatred for language itself, since language is seen as the medium of falsity. When Jaroslav is interviewed in ''The Joke,'' his first impulse

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Nonfiction: Um0ní románu: Cesta Vladislava Van5ury za velkou epikou, 1960; L’Art du roman, 1986 (The Art of the Novel, 1988; revised 2000); Les testaments trahis, 1993 (Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, 1995); Le Rideau: Essai en sept parties, 2005 (The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, 2007). 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.''' Gluma m-a dus cu gîndul la romanul rusesc din secolul al XIX-lea.. De pildă, Lucia Šebestkova și „mîntuitorul” ei, Kostka, sînt personaje dostoievskiene. Eroii își rememorează greșelile, păcatele și conchid că „viața și-a bătut joc de ei”. Destinul e cît se poate de ironic, măcar în cazul lui Jahn Ludvík și Kostka. Amîndoi au fost stăpîniți de idei despotice, de pasiuni nemiloase, amîndoi au fost amăgiți (ori s-au amăgit singuri), nici unul nu găsește o soluție izbăvitoare. Viețile lor pornesc de la o glumă, continuă ca farsă (uneori, tragică) și se rezolvă în caricatura cea mai trivială. Mă refer, firește, la episodul final cu Helena Zemánková. Femeia încearcă să se sinucidă din dragoste, dar înghite, din greșeală, un pumn de laxative. Să ajungi într-un closet, fiindcă iubești năprasnic un bărbat fără scrupule, fiindcă vrei să-l pedepsești, pare (și chiar este) o nedreptate strigătoare la cer.

The story takes place in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) over a period of twenty years, from the late forties to the sixties. The ultimate questions posed by the story include universal ones relating to individual responsibility, personal conscience in the face of an unforgiving, authoritarian regime, and whether or not it's possible to reconcile the past—tradition, religion, and the older ways—with modernity and the attempts (misguided ones in this story) to create justice for all through systematic planning and the expulsion of "offenders" like Ludvik from the system. The close of the story depicts a traditional Moravian folk festival called the Ride of the Kings. It serves partly as a metaphor for the continuity of life even in the midst of dictatorship and violent change. 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”. All this might read like a deeply conservative vision of culture and identity drawn from European Romanticism, from the idea that every people is defined by a unique history and culture that had to be protected from outside encroachment. Yet, as with much of Kundera’s thinking, nothing is quite so straightforward. While insisting that national culture was vital “to justify and preserve our national identity”, Kundera was also deeply hostile to the idea of cultures being confined by national boundaries. He took as his motto Goethe’s belief that “national literature no longer means much today”, because “we are entering the era of Weltliteratur – world literature – and it is up to each of us to hasten this development”. The “inability to see one’s own culture in the larger context”, Kundera denounced as “provincialism”. A musician is arranging his mistress’s abortion with a doctor who heads a fertilization clinic in an unorthodox manner: He impregnates his patients artificially, using his own semen. The man whose mission it is to fertilize then kills, and the man who wants to free himself supplies poison to a woman, the same musician’s mistress, who, not knowing about the poison, kills herself. Further complications follow. This novel is far more dramatic than anything else Kundera has published, but it does have the operatic quality of some of his early tales. The obvious tragic aspect of the happenings is countered step by step with genuinely comic happenings, accidents, and a jovial set of characters, almost all of whom preclude the kind of tragic tension that the mere plot implies. Steiner, Peter. “Ironies of History: The Joke by Milan Kundera.” In The Deserts of Bohemia: Czech Fiction and Its Social Context. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000.In 1968, The Joke was adapted into a film by Czech New Wave director Jaromil Jireš. Released in February 1969, some six months after the August 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion that ended the Prague Spring, the film was initially successful in theaters before it was pulled from distribution and banned for the next 20 years. [5] It is impossible to do justice here to the subtleties, comedy, and wisdom of this very beautiful novel. Milan Kundera is an artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere, who says that the good (and evil) that issues from men's souls matters much more than the deeds of a State. And he says it with passion, with good humor, and with love." —Salman Rushdie that Mr. Kundera is at both his strongest and most problematic. For he knows that the falsities pervading public life must seep into that private life to which people retreat for shelter. Love means speech, and speech has become devalued. In 2008, after an investigation, an accusation was made against Kundera in the Czech magazine Respekt. It was claimed that in 1950 he gave the name of Miroslav Dvoracek to the police. Dvoracek, a pilot, had escaped from Czechoslovakia but returned as a western intelligence agent; he was subsequently arrested, narrowly escaped the death penalty, and served 14 years in a labour camp.