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The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
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Publisher's summary
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
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Overall
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Performance
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Overall
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Overall
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Performance
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There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognize the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is erased while we simultaneously doubt our own. This also happens with couples - indeed, above all with couples, because lovers fear more than anything else "losing sight" of the loved one. With stunning artfulness in expanding and playing variations on the meaningful moment, Milan Kundera has made this situation - and the vague sense of panic it inspires - the very fabric of this novel.
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- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 3 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Disconcerted and enchanted, the listener follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than 200 years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show .
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Well done
- By Liam SR on 05-25-19
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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The Festival of Insignificance
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 2 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Listeners who know Milan Kundera's earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the "unserious" in a novel is not at all unexpected of him.
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A Review of Little Significance.
- By Darwin8u on 07-14-15
By: Milan Kundera
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Farewell Waltz
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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In this dark farce of a novel, set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American (at once saint and Don Juan); a popular trumpeter and his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife; an disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward. Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy.
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didn't agree well.
- By Davygamm on 09-26-21
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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The Art of the Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the postpsychological novel.
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Informative and Inspiring
- By Mo on 11-27-21
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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Testaments Betrayed
- An Essay in Nine Parts
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Milan Kundera has established himself as one of the great novelists of our time with such books as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In Testaments Betrayed, he proves himself a brilliant defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due to a work of art and its creator's wishes. The betrayal of both - often by their most passionate proponents - is the principal theme of this extraordinary work. Listeners will be particularly intrigued by Kundera's impassioned attack on society's shifting moral judgments and persecutions of art and artists.
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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Jacques and His Master
- A Play
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Simon Callow, David Timson
- Length: 1 hr and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Jacques and His Master is a deliciously witty and entertaining "variation" on Diderot's novel Jacques le Fatalist, written for Milan Kundera's "private pleasure" in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.
When the "heavy Russian irrationality" fell on Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera explains, he felt drawn to the spirit of the eighteenth century -"And it seemed to me that nowhere was it to be found more densely concentrated than in that banquet of intelligence, humor, and fantasy, Jacques le Fataliste."
The upshot was this "Homage to Diderot," which has now been performed throughout the United States and Europe. Here, Jacques and His Master, newly translated by Simon Callow, is a text that will delight Kundera's admirers throughout the English-speaking world.
By: Milan Kundera
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Encounter
- Essays
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Milan Kundera's brilliant new collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and ideas that characterizes his bestselling novels, the internationally acclaimed author revisits the artists whose works help us better understand what it means to be human. Elegant, startlingly original, and provocative, Encounter combines many of the author's signature themes with personal reflections and stories.
By: Milan Kundera
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The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
- By: Anais Nin
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Lagelee
- Length: 16 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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The Diary of Anaïs Nin is the published version of Anaïs Nin's own private manuscript diary, which she began at age 11 in 1914 during a trip from Europe to New York with her mother and two brothers. Nin would later say she had begun the diary as a letter to her father, Cuban composer Joaquín Nin, who had abandoned the family a few years earlier.
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Beautiful perspective from an incredible woman, surrounded by difficult and incredible men
- By Richard McKown on 12-11-23
By: Anais Nin
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Pnin
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.
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Why not leave their private sorrows to people?
- By Darwin8u on 01-13-20
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Reflections
- Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings
- By: Walter Benjamin
- Narrated by: Peter Demetz, Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin.
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W. B. Writes beautiful long sentences. yea!
- By Amazon Customer on 11-24-22
By: Walter Benjamin
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Unbearable Lightness
- A Story of Loss and Gain
- By: Portia de Rossi
- Narrated by: Portia de Rossi
- Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In this searing, unflinchingly honest book, Portia de Rossi captures the complex emotional truth of what it is like when food, weight, and body image take priority over every other human impulse or action. She recounts the elaborate rituals around eating that came to dominate hours of every day, from keeping her daily calorie intake below 300 to eating precisely measured amounts of food out of specific bowls and only with certain utensils. When this wasn’t enough, she resorted to purging and compulsive physical exercise, driving her body and spirit to the breaking point.
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For All Dieters, not just Anorexic Girls
- By Coghan on 02-20-13
By: Portia de Rossi
What listeners say about The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Phillip Barnard
- 11-11-19
Kundera Never Disappoints.
Just amazing. People who don’t appreciate Kundera are to me just simply stupid. Richmond Hoxie gives beautiful life and richness to Kundera’s works of art.
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- Baron
- 06-08-20
Brilliant but/and complex,
Narration superb, ideas and questions outstanding, story line... a bit hard to follow, and that gets in the way.
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- W Perry Hall
- 03-05-17
Too Much Authorial Prodding
3.5 stars. I'm aware this is a philosophical novel, important in criticizing the Czech communist regime then in power and, indeed, resulted in that regime's revocation of Kundera's citizenship.
Nonetheless, I cannot in good conscience give a novel 4 or 5 stars on that basis when I dislike the type of author interactivity in a work of fiction that pervades this "novel." That is to say, I have a hard time reading as a story, i.e., enjoying or being vivified by a fictional narrative in which the author repeatedly reminds me that he is making it all up, such as saying why he picked out this name or that and why he decided the character would take off her clothes in a public place or make whoopee with the protagonist or go to an island of misfit 12 year old boys, be made to disrobe then be touched repeatedly and privately as a kind of gross anti-goddess.
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- HIYBRID
- 02-09-13
Mostly Forgetting....
Not a rivetting experience for me. But then I though F.Scott was a bit wishy washy because his characters were lost. Maybe that's what I feel here. If you are chasing Kundera to understand him, go ahead. It didn't make a lasting impression on me.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Greg
- 10-06-21
Thoroughly enjoyed
Enjoyed it enough to try more books by the author.
This was my first and I found the characters to share a lot of those weird thoughts we all have that don't share.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Darwin8u
- 04-26-14
A well-lubricated orgy of ideas
Brilliant in parts, but also messy and uneven. It is a twisting novel of lovers, sex, names, poets, poltiics, borders, history, memory, nations and being. It slides from one original idea into another like remote lovers in a well-lubricated orgy of ideas. I don't know if it loses me because I loved The Unbearable Lightness of Being so much more, or if Kundera just failed to grab me by the intellectual shorthairs. I'm almost positive I would probably rate it higher if I had the chance to tease out the flesh a bit more. It reads (not in specifics, just in style and tone) like someone took several Wim Wenders films and randomly spliced pieces from his oevre; sometimes backwards, sometimes upsidedown, frequently disorienting.
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16 people found this helpful
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- Ted Meredith
- 06-04-13
Kundera Masterpiece
Where does The Book of Laughter and Forgetting rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
I love Milan Kundera. Love, love love.
I'll admit this book is a bit choppy, not your typical novel, a bit heady over hearty.
But that's why it's my favorite of his books, and it was great to hear life breathed into it by Richmond Hoxie.
What other book might you compare The Book of Laughter and Forgetting to and why?
If you liked this you'll love The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality, or Farewell Waltz - some of Kundera's more approachable works.
But for me, this one is tops.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Placeholder
- 04-03-24
Lots of history
The book Was a snapshot of that time but was wanted a larger perspective too,
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- Diana Dellos
- 01-30-24
Dull and confusing
Hard to follow the many stories, full of patriarchy (written in mid 70’s), odd sexual stories. Just didn’t enjoy it at all. Read for a book club.
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- Matt
- 09-18-19
Just Awful!
The narrator was great but the content was trash! It was required for a class and I hated that it was so sexually explicit!
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