Nesmrtelnost (Immortality), Kundera’s last novel written in Czech, was published in 1988. This philosophical novel of ideas opened the way for three short novels written in French – La Lenteur (1995), L’Identité (1998) and L’Ignorance (2000) – meditating on nostalgia, memory and the possibility of a homecoming. Ludvik muses that errors are not exceptional in history; they are the norm. Alone in a cafe, he reflects on a pair of common delusions: that of eternal memory, and that of redressibility. In his view, nothing will ever be redressed by revenge or forgiveness, but it will not matter, because it will be forgotten. Meanwhile, the heartbroken Helena swallows an entire bottle of what she believes are analgesics. She writes Ludvik a suicide note and gives it to her unsuspecting assistant to give to him. When the assistant finds Ludvik in the cafe and Ludvik reads the note, they race to find Helena, only to find that the bottle had instead contained embarrassingly non-fatal laxatives. is one of the most unnerving of its kind I have ever read, especially because there is no overt violence, only the absolute misuse of another person. I came away from this scene with the impression that, to some undetermined extent, ALL of this is depicted with a virtuosity that no writer of our moment quite matches. Yet there are troubling aspects too. Writers who portray degradation find it hard wholly to escape the stain of their subject. Sometimes the trouble in Mr. Kundera's work is minor, an adolescent silliness accompanying sexual adventure. More important is a certain spirit of vindictiveness - or so it appears to me - in his treatment of the sexual relation. The scene in which Ludvik humiliates Helena

Jahn then undergoes six years of "reeducation", which are split between prison and army service in a technical auxiliary battalion under a sadistic drill sergeant. While in the army, Alexej, a true believer in communism, appeals to higher authorities against their treatment; when the man is consequently expelled from the Party, he commits suicide. Like all great writers, Milan Kundera leaves indelible marks on his readers’ imaginations,” Salman Rushdie told the Guardian. “‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ Ever since I read this sentence in his The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, it has remained with me, and illuminated my understanding of events all over the world. Speaking to Roth in 1980 in the New York Times, Kundera lamented that he felt “the novel has no place” in the world, saying “the totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions”. https://literariness.org/2020/07/13/analysis-of-milan-kunderas-the-unbearable-lightness-of-being/ The Unbearable Lightness of Being A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.All this might read like a deeply conservative vision of culture and identity drawn from European Romanticism, from the idea that every people is defined by a unique history and culture that had to be protected from outside encroachment. Yet, as with much of Kundera’s thinking, nothing is quite so straightforward. While insisting that national culture was vital “to justify and preserve our national identity”, Kundera was also deeply hostile to the idea of cultures being confined by national boundaries. He took as his motto Goethe’s belief that “national literature no longer means much today”, because “we are entering the era of Weltliteratur – world literature – and it is up to each of us to hasten this development”. The “inability to see one’s own culture in the larger context”, Kundera denounced as “provincialism”. The only part of ''The Joke'' in which some sense of human worthiness prevails is that in which Mr. Kundera writes with knowledge and affection about Czech folk culture. He finds a touch of comfort in the authenticity of a past in Milan Kundera's The Joke is a novel about life under Communism, but also about the twists and turns of life in general, and the randomness and unexpected outcomes to which we're all subject. Now I understood why the king's face must be veiled! Not that he should not be seen, but that he should not see!"

It goes without saying that people with power over or interests in institutions don’t like humor. Remember that Queen Victoria’s ‘we are not amused’? Of course, you aren’t dear, it breaks the whole act. It is like emperor’s new clothes, they don't like reality.Kundera magisterially answers these and other questions by giving an indecent history of the young poet Jaromil: his life, beginning with his conception, all the way up to his pathetic and bathetic death. On the way, Kundera demolishes the Romantic myth of the poet as the truth seeker, or truth sayer. Instead of a prophet, he shows us a pervert. That, however, is only the consequence of Jaromil’s inability to lead an authentic life, precisely because he is and remains all the time a poet. The lyric quality so necessary for a poet is seen as the greatest obstacle to authenticity, to life as it should be lived. The book is split into seven parts with the first six parts focusing on one of the characters where we see events through their eyes. Ludvik Jahn is the main character and he has three parts to himself whilst Jaroslav, Helena and Kostka all have a part each. The last part is a mixture of viewpoints as all the characters are brought together. Now, I always love this type of approach to a novel as the multiple viewpoints makes it more three-dimensional and realistic than a third-person narrative or one from a single first-person narrative and it works well here with the type of story that Kundera is telling.