"The struggle of human beings against power is the struggle between memory and forgetting." - Milan Kundera, "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"

Like most people, I got to know Milan Kundera because of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". His writings are always romantic with a bit of satire on human nature, politics, and the present world, which are gorgeous, beautiful and warning. The character Hugo in "The Book of Laughing and Forgetting" keeps saying: "I want to write a love book about politics." Milan Kundera's works often have this tone.

Through seven short stories, the book describes the Czechs who were invaded by Russia. Milan Kundera's Russia - the composer who wrote the great fugues of the world, could not tolerate the phenomenon of new notes of musical notes. Yes, Russia writes pastoral songs for the Czech Republic, creating a new country, where people live in harmony, but everyone is fabricated from the same material, if you don't want to be these notes, or realize that this song has deviated from the most original of the Communist Party If you try to fight against your ideals with a roar, your fate is usually either to be smashed to pieces or to go to prison.

The history of the Czech Republic has always been caught between big countries, occupied and subjugated, and the fate of the country has always been beyond its control. Two of the short stories are both titled "Lost Letters". On the surface, they are love stories, but they tell the deeper difficulties of the Czechs. In the first story, Mirek, the protagonist, tries to erase his childhood love story, while in the second story, Tamina, in exile, tries to find the diary left behind in Prague with her deceased husband. They are struggling painfully between "memory" and "forgetting", no matter which choice they choose, it is almost desolate sadness.

Mirek's love history of escaping from the past is violent and poignant in Milan Kundera's pen: "He longs to reach out his arms to the past and punch his past. It seems to be broken into pieces." That period of history has become the darkest footnote in life. No matter how much influence the past has on the present, it must disappear completely. Milan Kundera used this image of erasing memory and the power to falsify historical facts Ways to combine: "Mirek's way of rewriting history is exactly the same as that of the Communist Party, and it is the same as that of all political parties, and it is the same as that of all nations, and it is the same as that of all human beings. The future, in fact, is a lie. The future is nothing more than an insignificant void, of no interest to anyone, but the past is so full of life that it is tempting to destroy it, or at least repaint it. People want to To dominate the future is really just to be able to change the past.”

In order to get her diary back, Tamina faced many difficulties. Whenever there was a glimmer of life, God made fun of her again. The image of the deceased husband and the diary, I think, is a symbol of the motherland. Tamina loved the deceased husband deeply, but his face became increasingly blurred. She practiced to describe the appearance of the deceased husband in her mind, but it was still lost like steam. However, when Tamina has skin-to-skin relations with other men, the figure of her deceased husband will clearly appear again, just like the patriotic sentiment that emerges in the heart when the country is invaded.

However, whether it is Mirek or Tamina, they are all abandoned by the motherland and the embodiment of Milan Kundera. He went into exile in France in 1975 and did not regain his Czech citizenship until 2019. The book uses magical and realistic techniques to describe people who believe in the Communist Party, dancing in a circle hand in hand, soaring into the sky into angels, and making melodious laughter. And those who are expelled from the party are expelled from the heavenly realm like devils, because their belief is "refusing to give a reasonable meaning to the world of gods", and they are forcibly excluded.

The book was completed in 1978. Today, the world written by Milan Kundera has never disappeared. As Taiwanese, we are also entangled in memory and forgetting, and we are allowed to be used as bargaining chips by big countries, and our ethnic identity is still an unspeakable pain for us. At the same time, Hong Kong is also facing China's brutal pastoral. In such a historical torrent, what else can a small country and a small people do?

The Czech Republic has become an unknown place under the description of Milan Kundera, "Human beings live in unknown cities, and the streets are either nameless, or they are not what they used to be, because the name is a continuation of the past, A person without a past will not have a name." But precisely because of his writing and his memory, this history has not been eliminated from the world, as "Guernica Under the Dark Curtain" said: "This incident The work (Guernica) proves that a single pen is far more powerful than tens of millions of guns." When I picked up "The Book of Laughing and Forgotten" again, I couldn't help translating the art design of the cover. Under the great waves of history, as long as one person's hand is still raised, the battle is still going on.

 ⠀The struggle of human beings against power is the struggle between memory and forgetting

Book Information｜
Title: The Book of Laughing and Forgetting Author: Milan Kundera Translator: Yu Chixiu Publisher: Crown Press More Krachreading▸ https://www.instagram.com/krachreading/

Link from the blog: "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" If you like this book, please use this link to buy it. Krachreading will get a small reward and encourage me♡♡