Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

People best know Czech-born writer Milan Kundera for his novels, including

The Joke

(1967),

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

(1979), and

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

(1984), all of which exhibit his extreme though often comical skepticism.

Since 1975, he lived in exile in France and in 1981 as a naturalized citizen.

Kundera wrote in Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; people therefore consider these original works as not translations.

The Communist government of Czechoslovakia censored and duly banned his books from his native country, the case until the downfall of this government in the velvet revolution of 1989.