The Joke

In 1948, Ludvík — a young Czech — writes a postcard to a girl he wants to impress: ‘Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!’ She reports him. He is expelled from the Party, from university, from the world that was supposed to be his future. Fifteen years later, he is planning his revenge on the man responsible — and what he discovers, in the process, is that history is not a story of justice but a joke: one whose punchline arrives when it is too late for the knowledge to be useful.

Kundera’s first novel, written in 1965 and suppressed after the Soviet invasion, is the work in which his characteristic themes first find their full expression: the relationship between the personal and the political, between love and power, between memory and the self that remembers. Its formal invention — four narrators whose accounts never quite cohere — is the perfect vehicle for a story about the impossibility of a single truth.

Essential Kundera — and a document of historical witness that reads with complete contemporaneity. Published by Faber & Faber.