The Joke, by Milan Kundera
HarperCollins Publishers, 1992
The Joke reads like a snag in a sweater that you just can't leave alone until you've unraveled the whole thing, no matter how sad it leaves you when you are finished and left with nothing.
Full of political overtones, The Joke begins with a postcard written in half-mocking jest, which snowballs into the most drastic change in a person's life.
The main character, Ludvik, author of the postcard, winds up kicked out of the Communist Party and branded as a scoundrel. How Ludvik struggles to assess his true political leanings and feelings for his country is the crux of The Joke.
Told in distinct voices alternating between Ludvik and a few of the important people in his life, this is a deeply moving story. Kundera brilliantly shows us the futility of revenge as Ludvik finally is released from the forced-labor camp and plots to seduce the wife of the man responsible for his exile -- a man who Ludvik finds now holds beliefs very similar to his own.
I could read this book repeatedly for Kundera's stunningly beautiful and emotional prose. For example, when Kundera describes the simple gestures by Lucie, who Ludvik meets while on leave from his labor camp:
From then on, there were flowers waiting for me every time we met, and in the end I gave in, because I was disarmed by the spontaneity of giving and understood that Lucie cared for it; perhaps her tongue-tied state, her lack of verbal eloquence, made her think of flowers as a form of speech; not in the sense of heavy-handed conventional flower symbolism, but in a sense still more archaic, more nebulous, more instinctive, prelinguistic; perhaps, having always been sparing of words, she longed for that mute stage of evolution when there were no words and people communicated by simple gestures, pointing at trees, laughing, touching one another...
I found it difficult to put this book down, and wanted to keep underlining its beautiful passages. The Joke is a highly rewarding novel to read, and the weight of its characters will stay with you long after you finish reading it.
