Rating: 
Summary: My favorite book of all time!
Review: I feel that this novel, even above The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is a great "first introduction" to Kundera's prose style. This was the first book of Milan Kundera's I had ever read, and by far the best of all his work. From the first page, I found myself utterly absorbed in this book, devouring each page, and wanting even more at the end. Kundera's style, like Hemingway's, is simple, and yet so moving. I recommend this book to anyone who has enjoyed Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or even Albert Camus. This book remains my favorite of all-time to this day.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Kundera
Review: Milan Kundera mixes half a dozen apparently different stories in a book with such a confortable format (3 or 4 pages chapters) you actually forget he is dense. Sexuality is deeply explored and placed as the main inspiration and soorce of trouble in life. If not as good as 'Inmortality', this book explores complex human dimensions as love, politics, sex, bueaty, and poetry. It takes a good writer to exploit one of these, but a penmaster to do it with all of them.
Rating:
Summary: Asbolutely Fantastic, vivacious, enthralling
Review: I normally have a very short attention span, especially when it comes to reading. But philosophy books are my forte, and this was undoubtedly the most enjoyable work I have ever read, inviting me to turn the page, and challenging my views, and changing my mind. The book is nothing short of brilliant, and is filled with luminous quotes on nearly every page. The images were fresh, vivacious, and enthralling, and the words were wonderfully placed.
Rating:
Summary: Astonishingly Wonderful; A Must-Read
Review: THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING is a rare and precious jewel. In many ways this is an experimental novel, the seven different parts of the book are compared by the author to Beethoven's variations upon a musical theme. These different variations either describe, converge upon, or dance around the story of Tamina, a Czech exile who ran away from the communists with her husband only to see him die of disease soon afterward. As time passes she becomes obsessed with the mortal fear that she will forget him. She cannot go back to her homeland but she can try to get her husband's love letters back, to bring some of his laughter back into her life, to remind her that she is not alone. Tamina's homeland meanwhile, still languishes and suffers under the boot of the Soviet Union. The intellectuals who were so excited about communism in the late 1940s can't believe how wrong it goes over the next twenty years and try to correct their mistake. But the Soviets will have none of their "stalking a lost deed" as Kundera calls it--just as the Czechs are succeeding in relaxing the strictures of totalitarianism, in storm the Soviet tanks in 1968, ending the "Prague Spring" and delaying freedom in Eastern Europe for another twenty-one years. Published in 1978, three years after Kundera escaped the Iron Curtain and set down new roots in France, this book is also an important historical document. (I actually read it for the first time as an assignment for a 20th Century European history class in college in 1991--I'm still grateful to the professor.) It is important because it warns us of the insidious dangers of "forgetting." One of the first things the communists did after crushing the Prague Spring was to fire some one hundred forty-five Czech historians from the universities in an attempt to erase the memory of the people. It is frightening how well they might have succeeded if the Soviet economy had stayed strong for another generation or two. THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING is touching and erotic, a moving and inspired intellectual feat. It is not humorous, but if you are open to the experience, it will inspire "serious laughter, laughter beyond joking." Kundera has a gentle, straightforward style that evokes rich and vivid images (at least as translated by Michael Henry Heim--I look forward to reading Aaron Asher's in the future). For anyone who has loved, for anyone who has a memory, for anyone who appreciates the freedom we have in this society, THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING is a must.
Rating:
Summary: Forgetting?
Review: I read this book while working in a small shop in the French Quarter last summer. Everytime someone walked in and found me crying, they would try to comfort me and would then be annoyed that I was crying because of this book. Kundera, without a doubt, manages to capture the bittersweet reality of love and loss. In his typical postmodern narrative fashion, _The Book of Laughter and Forgetting_ reads like a symphony: there is happiness and sorrow, pain and joy. I found this book to be as close to the truth about love and loss as a writer can come. In the end, you feel as if you have managed to somehow deal with the bitter reality and survived.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Magnificent; One of the Best Novels Ever
Review: This book really did change the way I look at things. Also,don't miss "Immortality", Kundera's other masterpiece. Hewill liberate you from "dragging your painful self through the world" into a different realm.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning!
Review: I love Kundera's books. I make no apolgies on that point. While they are not the type of books that I would categorize as "leisure reading", his works are absolutely captivating. K shows off his erudition as he takes us on a stroll thru 20th century postmodernism. It is difficult to categorize this book....and perhaps that's the point. His remarks on music, love and poetry are trenchant and evocative. I would highly recommend that every educated and cultured person should read MK. Just bring a sense of wonder and your imagination......let Mr. Kundera do the rest!
Rating:
Summary: Multiple Intellectual Orgasms
Review: This book launched a re-awakening of my non-fiction laden mind. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the literary catalyst for an endless series of powerful intellectual and spiritual orgasms. Read it.
Rating:
Summary: kundera is a magician of words
Review: an extraordinary book. it's been said that all great art should aspire to the quality of music and this book is a glorious musical composition that is so funny, so beautiful and so amazingly dead on. kundera writes of humankind with such tenderness and insight, that you have to gasp when you recogonize your own most obscure, convoluted, secret thought right there on the page. read it slow. savor it's truths. but mostly read it and enjoy. and laugh!
Rating:
Summary: intelectual and sexual arousal
Review: I see Kundera as a chintesence of the senses, here and ther weighing more or less on a particular one. His work is expanding like concentric circles over literature, criticism, politics, everyday life and then is closing on you, the reader provoking intelectual and physical excitments.
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