29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Kunderas first novel, and maybe one of his best., March 20, 2001
This review is from: The Joke (Definitive Version) (Paperback)
After reading several books by Kundera -one of my favorite authors-, I decided to try his first novel, "The Joke". Because it's the first one, its natural that the style would differ from his latest production...however, the author is the same and the style is similar in all of his work, he explores human thoughts and emotions beautifully, maybe not in a such profound way like Dostoievsky or Hesse, but close enough to be in the same league.
If you want a detail of the plot (I personally don't like to do that before reading a book), you will probably find that in other reviews, I'll just said that the story is about a man that lost all of his achievements just for a misunderstanding, a joke that was not well received in a communism society. Kundera explores the thoughts of this man (in several time periods of his life), but also takes other characters and gives them a protagonic level (the story is written in first person, in the view of all of the characters). The book gets more and more interesting as it develops, and the climax is at the end, the last 50 pages are brilliant. A dramatic story with a great end.
Five stars for the way Kundera allow readers to get to know and love his characters.....brilliant narrative, brilliant book.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"From whence a perfect joke must spring, November 26, 2005
This review is from: The Joke (Definitive Version) (Paperback)
A joke's a very serious thing."
So said the 18th-century English poet Charles Churchill in "The Ghost". And a silly joke was a very serious thing for Ludvik, the protagonist of Milan Kundera's first novel "The Joke."
Written and set in 1965 Prague and first published in Czechoslovakia in 1967, the novel opens with Ludvik looking back on the joke that changed his life in the early 1950s. Ludvik was a dashing, witty, and popular student. Like most of his friends he was an enthusiastic supporter of the still-fresh Communist regime in post-World War II Czechoslovakia. In a playful mood he writes a postcard to one of the girls in his class during their summer break. Since she seems, according to Ludvik, to be a bit too serious he writes on the postcard "Optimism is the opium of the people! The healthy atmosphere stinks! Long live Trotsky!" His colleagues and fellow young-party leaders did not quite see the humor in the sentiment expressed in the postcard. Ludvik finds himself expelled from the party and college and drafted to that part of the Czech military where alleged subversives form work brigades and spend the next few years working in mines.
Despite the interruption in his career Ludvik has become a successful scientist. But despite his success, his treatment at the hands of his former friends has left him bitter and angry. An opportunity arises when he meets Helena, an old friend now married to Pavel, the friend who led the efforts to purge Ludvik from the party. Ludvik decides to seduce Helena as a means of exacting his revenge. In essence this is the second `joke' of the novel. Although the seduction is successful things do not quite play out the way Ludvik expects, the novel's third joke' and he is left once more to sit and think bitter thoughts. Ultimately he decides that these sorts of jokes and their bitter repercussions are not the fault of the humans who set them in motion but are really just a matter of historic inevitability. Ultimately then one cannot blame forces that cannot be changed or altered.
Written in Czech (before Kundera left for France where he began writing in French) this is one of Kundera's more accessible works. The book is narrated through the voices of four people, Ludvik, Helena, Kostka, who has since become a Christian and absented himself from the commercial and political life of the regime, and Jaroslav whose love of traditional Czech folk music forms a nice counterpoint to life in 1960s Czechoslovakia. Kundera switches seamlessly from one voice to the next even as the changes in voice become more frequent towards the novel's conclusion. Although Ludvik is a bit self-absorbed that self-absorption is not nearly as all-consuming as one sees in the characters in Kundera's more recent efforts.
A word about the translation. There is an old French expression: "translations are like women - if they are beautiful, they are not faithful; if they are faithful they are not beautiful." This edition is designated by the publisher as the `definitive' translation. Kundera has expressed no small amount of dissatisfaction with earlier translations of this work and Kundera spent a lot of time working with the translator to ensure that the voice heard in the English version corresponds to the voice heard in the original Czech. Each reader may have a different opinion as to the beauty of the translated prose (I think it reads very well) but I think that given Kundera's blessing that it is, at the very least, faithful.
L. Fleisig
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
political or not, April 7, 2006
This review is from: The Joke (Definitive Version) (Paperback)
At the end of the French edition I have there is a short comment of the author about the history of The Joke, including its interdiction in Czechoslovakia and the bad translations it had to go through afterwards. And finally, Kundera seems to feel relieved that now, when everyone forgot about the invasion of his home country, his readers don't see The Joke as a political novel, but simply as a novel.
Indeed, some of the reviewers on this site needed to mention that "one does not have to have a particular political interest to enjoy this book", "The Joke is, frankly, not very political" and I simply wonder why such a fear of the political. No doubt, Kundera is way beyond a simple journalist describing life behind the Iron curtain. But why would a romance or science fiction novel or even a "just novel" be better than a political one?
Take the political out of The Joke and we're left with an absurd novel. An unexplainable and ridiculous trouble over a post card, the hard life of a worker in the coal mines, where he has to stay for unclear reasons, a "stupid" young lady who doesn't seem to understand a man's idea of love and an equally stupid hateful sex affair which pushes another na?ve woman to suicide. Young, modern Miss Brozova, to whom Zemanek's and Ludvik's past were equally blameable, aberrant and indifferent, was thinking the same way.
I have asked someone about the movie made after The Unbearable lightness of being and all I heard was some vague memory of a few hot sex scenes. I have the feeling that both books are reduced to that in the view of many readers and it's a pity. If this is what we are looking for, I would recommend Pascal Bruckner - Bitter Moon: it's brilliant and no trace of politics mixed with sex.
The Joke is a masterpiece which combines them. And the postcard is only a minor but well chosen example of the many possible "jokes" of a regime. Kostka, the religious, didn't have to be caught with any postcards to get in trouble and his life is not any less a bitter joke. He tried, humble, the impossible reconciliation of his belief in God with the communist fatalities and still lost. Jaroslav, the folklore lover, tried a similar adaptation and ended up in an ambulance. Their lives, the romance, the sex, are all influenced by political circumstances, more or less directly. Which is why it's simplistic to judge them or Ludvik for his hate, need for revenge and incapability to forget, or the whole situation as a result of a badly misunderstood joke on a postcard. Isn't it why we love Kundera? Because he explains it so well and encourages us not to be simplistic?
Some said they found in the book many problems any of us can have at some point in life. Since the "some" come mainly from a democratic USA, I have serious doubts. And serious hopes that no one will ever have such problems. Unless, of course, we are talking about girls refusing to sleep with guys, the masks and stupidities of young age, rape, hate, revenge - all of them thought taken out of context, and which may indeed (and unfortunately) happen anywhere and to anyone. Actually, let's get rid of this low infatuation with ourselves which tells us to like a book only because "we find ourselves in it"; we do that enough in relationships all the time.
I really don't mean to give definitions and put The Joke in a literary category/genre etc, I even understand why Kundera had enough of his novel being considered political. I just don't think the other extreme is better; it would mean not only deleting pages and pages of the book, but also neglecting a big idea which makes the novel a believable, explainable and logical whole.
In conclusion, it's a rather simple (as in classic, not simplistic) novel (comparing to say, Immortality), yes it is not ONLY political, but lets not cheapen it by recommending it to Harry Potter fans.
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