a road to evocation of national and personal Czech identity, even conscience. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, a novel of disjointed action in which Kundera himself makes an autobiographical guest appearance, opens with an account of the communist-era practice of purging from history books heroes the state banished. Retention and official manipulation of memory becomes a major theme: "The struggle of man [undoubtedly the Czech people] against power [probably the Soviet bloc] is the struggle of memory against forgetting" (BL 4). Yet Kundera's self-aware art retains a sense of ironic proportion, for in the novel's final scene, several characters discourse with what they take to be grand seriousness about the de
...