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Product Info

Publisher: Harper

Author: Milan Kundera

ISBN: 9780060995058

Year: 1993

Format: Paperback

Classics, Fiction

The Joke by
Milan Kundera

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$ 400.00 mxn

The Joke by

Milan Kundera

Reviews

"A thoughtful, intricate, ambivalent novel with the reach of greatness in it."

John Updike

Summary

In this new English-language version of Kundera's classic first novel, completely revised by the author to incorporate the most accurate portions of two previous translations plus his own corrections, the narrator Ludvik wonders, "What if History plays jokes?" 

This politically charged question, coupled with Ludvik's fate as an unintentional dissident, struck a chord in Czech readers; the novel's 1967 publication was a key literary event of the Prague Spring.

Looking back on the tense, McCarthy-like atmosphere of the late 1940s, it chronicles the disastrous results of Ludvik's prankish postcard to a girlfriend criticizing the Czech communist regime. He is expelled from the Communist Party, forced to leave the university and join a special army unit with other enemies of the state. Years later, after he has resumed his studies and become a successful scientist, his lingering anger at the man who engineered his expulsion culminates in an act of destructive sexual revenge that serves only to show Ludvik he has never really understood any woman and is indeed the butt of one of history's many cruel jokes.

The fresh descriptions and masterful employment of several narrators testify to Kundera's power as a novelist, unmistakable even in this early work.

“To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”

John Steinbeck