Rating: 
Summary: I think it must have been good.
Review: I read this a couple of years ago and remember being very fond of it. As i write this review, i'm looking at the book sitting on my bookshelf but it occurs to me that i have almost no memory of what it was about. I think that's funny for some reason.
Rating: 
Summary: Provides real historical insight . . .
Review: This book is wonderful if you know how to read it. I don't believe it's meant to be read as a novel, but rather as a series of vignettes about individuals, moments, feelings, and emotions of "ordinary people" during the tumultuous post-WWII Czech Republic. That part of the novel is delightful and a breath of fresh air; it's real history painted with delicate attention to detail instead of the broad, sweeping strokes of historians who have a habit of focusing on well-known dissidents and politicians. I've never read other books by Kundera, so perhaps my interpretation is skewed. However, I have visited Prague and this book satiated the thirst I've had to scratch beneath the surface of the touristic atomosphere that has taken over there. Read this book, and imagine that the people you encounter on the streets in Prague likely remember the oppression and misery Kundera speaks of in these pages.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful!
Review: The self proclaimed 'book' of laughter and forgetting is a wonderful tour-de-force that packs a punch concerning the concepts and ever recurring themes of life on earth. Kundera explores and questions the ideas behind laughter and the difference between laughing when things lose their meaning and laughing because of meaning. When reading this book you are sure to drown amidst the laughter of angels.
Rating: 
Summary: Strange
Review: This was my first book by Kundera. I didn't understand it very much to tell you the truth, although I learnt that Milan has a pathologic fixation about the Soviet Invasion to the Czech Republic (to which he refers in every story of the book).
Rating:
Summary: Complex and difficult read; good discussion
Review: I read this for a book group. We all arrived for the meeting talking about how frustrating the read had been. We were then most pleasantly surprised that this book generated one of our best discussions in months. It's a meaty read.
Rating:
Summary: Very, very good......but not for Kundera..
Review: I would quickly give this book five stars, but having read two other Kundera novels, this is my least favorite. It was intellectual, of course, but it wasn't as idea-oriented as the Unbearable Lightness of Being or Immortality. It had some great passages about laughter, communism, and music, but Kundera's generalizations and aphorisms weren't as convincing they are in his later works. Also, I wasn't moved by the ending.
Rating:
Summary: Complexity
Review: A complex piece of public vs. private, the book is really less about laughter and more about forgetting. Tamina submits to Hugo, hoping that in turn he will find a way to bring back her cherished diary - her only mode of remembering. We see a different set of Kunderan issues in this book, where like Tomas in the Unbearable Lightness of Being, the characters find in their private erotic lives, the empowerment and freedom they so lack in the public arena. In a sea of disappointment, all the characters seem to fail to achieve their goals what is clear from Tamina's experience is that all this possibility in the erotic sphere comes with as much risk as it does promise. As is evidenced by the suffering of Tamina, few of his characters go unscathed. Just like the story of the hat, it is clear that remembering is a sort of forgetting. In a world of broken dreams, we tend to find places of solace and comfort despite the risk. We laugh, we cry, we forget, we remember, we live the tension and live out our Nietzschean potential, picking and choosing what we remember. A celebration of our human, all too human, side. Another Kundera triumph.Miguel Llora
Rating:
Summary: This can be as DEEP a book as you decide to make it...
Review: Seven stories that have some connection to each other in some various ways. This was an international bestseller which I did get something out of & I would recommend it. Depending on 'YOU' this book can be as DEEP as you want it to be. Each story gave me something different--here's the premise &/or what I got out of each: Story 1: Personal letters reveal secrets. Story 2: Exploratory love works for those willing to explore. A childhood memory returns and a true to life fantasy is created. A mothers arrival is pleasantly expected for a given time frame. A mothers visit adds a bit of controversy. A mothers departure reeks of soft spoken love. Story 3: There are many good reasons to smile, laugh, and dance in a circle. Living is happiness. Laughing is living profoundly. Story 4: A yearning and hope to read one's long lost written words are revisited. The realization that every one without exception bears a protential writer within him. Story 5: A story of love & hopelessness between a 'pretty boy Prague student' and a married woman. A parable for the aspirirng poet &/or writer. Story 6: Is forgetting a voyage to dying? Real music epics (symphonies) are a thing of the past. Sex is not love but merely a territory love takes over. Is the closeness of death all but a carefree childlike dream? Story 7: The border of realization where 'everything' no longer has meaning is examined and clearly visible in our lives with repetition.
Rating:
Summary: I hope someone will read this.
Review: In this somewhat somber farce of a novel, Kundera seems to capture the essence of the plight of modern life. In seven integrated parts, Kundera takes us through a whirlwind of emotions as the lives of the characters are often mirrored in some Kundera contorted fashion to one's own life. Kundera writes sometimes in a shocking and unabashfed way, which can make one gasp, shudder, and laugh all at the same time. And throughout the novel there is the recurring theme as to how does a person live today within complexities of relationships, careers, politics, ect., without being crushed by their weight or letting themselves be fluttered away into meaninglessnes. And although Kundera writes in an ambiguous way, he carries us to that borderline at which one can live within the extremes, and he carries one there on the coattails of not only laughter and forgetting but also at the same time with solemnity and remembering.
Rating:
Summary: One of Kundera's best
Review: One of the things that is interesting about Kundera's works is how he often ties different stories and different narrators in together, and combines stories that flow in and out in different directions (like Unbearable Lightness, perhaps his most famous, which combines two couples). This book has many stories which flow together with varied narration, and in a few of them, the narrator rises out of the page to tell his own stories. Kundera is undoubtedly a post-modernist, but there is something fascinatingly easy to read about all of his stories. It's clear from reading this how he loves and obsesses about his characters. This book is a fantastic read that really makes you think a lot about the relations between men and women, and also about life in a (former) Soviet controlled country. I think in America we feel very removed from what went on in Eastern Europe, but much of Kundera's writing based on the horrors he experienced bring you in touch with that world.
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