Memories of a Wistful Amnesiac
GOODMAN, WALTER
Memories of a Wistful Amnesiac The Book of Laughter and Forgetting By Milan Kundera Knopf. 228 pp. SI0.95. Reviewed by Walter Goodman We begin with a funny, frightful contemporary political...
...Friends are gathered around a grave as an interminable speech is being made to the departed...
...He quotes one of the scores of historians fired from Czech universities: "The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory...
...The hat metaphor returns again in the last of these gently reflective, subtly connected tales of laughter and forgetting...
...Kundera writes: "It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning, love, convictions, faith, history...
...Her ministrations as the commissar of sex arouse laughter, not las-civiousness...
...Grief is overwhelmed by hilarity at the hat's demise...
...In exile in France since 1975, Kundera writes more or less in the first person, about other Czech exiles, whether abroad like himself or still at home yet disconnected from their national identity...
...On a frosty day in February 1948, the Czech Communist Party chief Klement Gott-wald is on a balcony delivering a speech to hundreds of thousands of people...
...A gust of wind takes the hat of one of the mourners...
...One simply allows oneself to be destroyed...
...The laughter in this book comes from a broken heart, but an intact spirit...
...But his fur hat remains on Gottwald's head...
...Thereafter, when photographs of the 1948 demonstration are distributed by the Party's propaganda section, no one is standing beside Gott-wald...
...The world, a student reflects, is half love, half joke...
...Next to him is his old comrade Vladimir Clementis...
...A specialist in characters who talk mainly to themselves, he offers here a send-up of intellectuals that will find resonance beyond the borders of Czechoslovakia...
...Hats off...
...Such are the means used by Milan Kundera, who was airbrushed out of Czechoslovak letters after the Russian invasionof 1968, to convey the spirit of a people who have been deprived of their past, in a country where even the street names have been lobotomized...
...Kundera tells of using a nom de plume after being blacklisted in order to write a popular column on astrology...
...He has good aim...
...But Kundera is beyond polemics...
...The world around it will forget even faster...
...His voice is never strident .His humor is rueful...
...Once in the charmed circle of Communist believers, he has been cast out, shorn of his citizenship, and all he can do now is kick the behinds of those who still dance in time and chant the rote refrains...
...Reviewed by Walter Goodman We begin with a funny, frightful contemporary political joke...
...Any human action we observe, can be manipulated to the point of absurdity...
...His feelings go deep, but his touch is light, and although the material he is compelled to work with is not sweet, it leaves no bitter aftertaste...
...He took on "the existence of a man erased from history, literary reference books, even the telephone book, a corpse brought back to life in the amazing reincarnation of a preacher sermonizing hundreds of thousands of young Socialists on the great truths of astrology...
...In the delicious story called "The Border," the narrator finds himself at an orgy where the hostess bustles about managing the various couplings and triplings in the interest of sexual spontaneity...
...Clementis has been airbrushed out...
...In a gesture of solicitude, Clementis takes off his fur cap and sets it on Gottwald's bare head...
...Four years later, Clementis is charged with treason and hanged...
...One common response to such a feeling of powerlessness Kundera calls lit-ost, a rage so deep that it prevents one from fighting back or surrendering or running away...
...The passions of his characters turn in a moment to laughter, as in the story of a young man and a married woman who, through an elementary misunderstanding, do not culminate their affair but instead spend together a night full of ennobling sentiment, with her hand clutching his upright member...
...Destroy its books, its culture, its history...
...Human life—and herein lies its secret—takes place in the immediate proximity of that border...
...That is not Kun-dera's response, however...
...it moves, by gusts, closer and closer to the grave—and finally plops in...
...They can discourse eloquently of everything except one critical subject—the condition that is preventing them from speaking out...
...The borders that intrigue Kundera are not so much those between nations as those between emotions...
...Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was...
...Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history...
...hehasagift for combining farce and melancholy...
Vol. 63 • December 1980 • No. 23
