This "novel in the form of variations" [The Book of Laughter and Forgetting] is a series of seven responses to a single event: After a Party leader was charged with treason and hanged, the Communist Czechoslovakia propaganda apparatus airbrushed his face out of a famous ceremonial photograph. These meditations on the state's denial of memory involve a number of different imaginary characters and occasionally author Milan Kundera himself. Against the bleak voids of a self-obliterating history are set the gentle human comedies of people trying to restore or revise their own past. They are always tempted to forget, to relive their innocence, to act like sinister children, to indulge in mindless sex, or to dance to mindless music….

Kundera is a delightful writer, a more demanding and elegant Vonnegut. This is a somber and amusing book.

Charles Nicol, "Book Briefs: 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting'," in Saturday...