The Joke

Product Information

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. For some though, such as the writer Geoff Dyer, Kundera’s importance lies precisely in this extension of the novel into meditative interrogation, by which, Dyer thinks, he “recalibrated fiction to create forms of new knowledge”. This is a lot more than a political novel. Kundera manages to create parallels in personal and political lives of characters. I especially liked narrator's love story at Labour camp. I really liked Lucie's story. a number of years ago in a botched English translation and has now been reissued, without cuts and with the author's approval.

The Joke ( Czech: Žert) is Milan Kundera's first novel, originally published in 1967. It describes how a student's private joke derails his life, and the entwined stories of his lovers and friends grappling with the shifting roles of folk traditions and religion under Communist Czechoslovakia. A musician is arranging his mistress’s abortion with a doctor who heads a fertilization clinic in an unorthodox manner: He impregnates his patients artificially, using his own semen. The man whose mission it is to fertilize then kills, and the man who wants to free himself supplies poison to a woman, the same musician’s mistress, who, not knowing about the poison, kills herself. Further complications follow. This novel is far more dramatic than anything else Kundera has published, but it does have the operatic quality of some of his early tales. The obvious tragic aspect of the happenings is countered step by step with genuinely comic happenings, accidents, and a jovial set of characters, almost all of whom preclude the kind of tragic tension that the mere plot implies. work is minor, an adolescent silliness accompanying sexual adventure. More important is a certain spirit of vindictiveness - or so it appears to me - in his treatment of the sexual relation. The scene in which Ludvik humiliates Helena Only apart from the fray could you record your testament: this is how the novel faces power, he argued famously, with “the fight of memory against forgetting”. Havel, who remained in “the country of the weak” (as Kundera described it in The Unbearable Lightness of Being), was jailed and then fought to lead a new Czech nation in the successful Velvet Revolution, admonished him: history is not a clever divinity playing jokes on us – we are “creators of our own fate”. But Kundera had long since left the stage.The character Pavel Zemánek was inspired by Pavel Kohout. Jireš wanted to cast him in the movie, but eventually decided to cast a professional actor Luděk Munzar. In the role of prisoner Alexej, Jireš cast a pastor and later Charter 77 spokesman Miloš Rejchrt. The film was shot in Prague, Uherské Hradiště, Olomouc, Most and Vlčnov. The novel was referenced in The Fall's song "The Joke" on the album Cerebral Caustic. The song's refrain is, "The Joke! Five years in a PC camp – The Joke!", linking humourless Eastern Bloc authoritarianism to political correctness. [ citation needed] See also [ edit ] IN both ''The Joke'' and the several works of fiction he has since published, Mr. Kundera has undertaken a project with few precedents or parallels in modern literature. He strives to evoke the tone of life in a society corroded by The Joke is Kundera's first novel and features four primary characters: Ludvik Jahn (the primary protagonist), Jaroslav, Helena, and Kostka. The novel does not contain a standard narrative and is best understood with respect to the plot lines concerning these four characters.

un eseu din Arta romanului (2022, pp.109-110), Milan Kundera afirmă că a construit cu maximă atenție arhitectura romanului. Un roman nu trebuie să fie inform (ca Omul fără însușiri, de exemplu): In 1968, The Joke was adapted into a film by Czech New Wave director Jaromil Jireš. Released in February 1969, some six months after the August 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion that ended the Prague Spring, the film was initially successful in theaters before it was pulled from distribution and banned for the next 20 years. [5] I'd always taken comfort in seeing Lucie as something abstract, a legend and a myth, but now I realised that behind the poetry of my vision hid a starkly unpoetic reality; that I didn't know her as she actually was, in and of herself. All I'd been able to perceive (in my youthful egocentricity) was those aspects of her being touching directly on me (my loneliness, my captivity, my desire for tenderness and affection); she had never been anything more to me than a function of my situation, everything she was in her own right, had escaped me entirely." Jaroslav's joke is the transition away from his coveted Moravian folk lifestyle and appreciation. Kostka, who has separated himself from the Communist Party due to his Christianity, serves as a counterpoint to Ludvik. The concept of a joke pervades the novel. The title derives from a postcard the protagonist, Ludvik, writes to Marketa, the target of his affection, while she is studying Marxism in a Czech summer school in the early 60's:

most popular

Gluma m-a dus cu gîndul la romanul rusesc din secolul al XIX-lea.. De pildă, Lucia Šebestkova și „mîntuitorul” ei, Kostka, sînt personaje dostoievskiene. Eroii își rememorează greșelile, păcatele și conchid că „viața și-a bătut joc de ei”. Destinul e cît se poate de ironic, măcar în cazul lui Jahn Ludvík și Kostka. Amîndoi au fost stăpîniți de idei despotice, de pasiuni nemiloase, amîndoi au fost amăgiți (ori s-au amăgit singuri), nici unul nu găsește o soluție izbăvitoare. Viețile lor pornesc de la o glumă, continuă ca farsă (uneori, tragică) și se rezolvă în caricatura cea mai trivială. Mă refer, firește, la episodul final cu Helena Zemánková. Femeia încearcă să se sinucidă din dragoste, dar înghite, din greșeală, un pumn de laxative. Să ajungi într-un closet, fiindcă iubești năprasnic un bărbat fără scrupule, fiindcă vrei să-l pedepsești, pare (și chiar este) o nedreptate strigătoare la cer. He switched his degree to film, but in 1950 was expelled for “anti-party activities”, an incident that gave birth to The Joke. Allowed to return to his studies, he rejoined the political fold in 1956, remaining in the party for the next 14 years. His freewheeling, speculative manner as a teacher of world literature at the Prague film school from 1958 until 1969 influenced many Czech new wave directors, Miloš Forman among them. The book is split into seven parts with the first six parts focusing on one of the characters where we see events through their eyes. Ludvik Jahn is the main character and he has three parts to himself whilst Jaroslav, Helena and Kostka all have a part each. The last part is a mixture of viewpoints as all the characters are brought together. Now, I always love this type of approach to a novel as the multiple viewpoints makes it more three-dimensional and realistic than a third-person narrative or one from a single first-person narrative and it works well here with the type of story that Kundera is telling. Weeks, Mark. “Milan Kundera: A Modern History of Humor Amid the Comedy of History.” Journal of Modern Literature 28 (Spring, 2005): 130-148.

Mr. Kundera the writer is complicit in the act of Ludvik the character, so zestful and even strangely joyous is the description of it. I was surprisingly impressed with the depth, accessibility and enjoyability of this novel. The novel, published in 1967, apparently played a role in the 1968 Prague Spring of reforms and protests aimed at the stifling effects of Commu Steiner, Peter. “Ironies of History: The Joke by Milan Kundera.” In The Deserts of Bohemia: Czech Fiction and Its Social Context. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000.

on folk culture, they are saturated with politics. Like his Ludvik, Mr. Kundera is trapped by the time in which he lives. And that, perhaps, is the final rotten joke that history has played on Milan Kundera, politics. One suspects the visionary is there because Mr. Kundera, trying to be ''fair,'' felt a need to plant a character who would oppose the sardonic thrust of the book; but it does not work. The three main voices, How men in particular deal with this bleakness and depression reflects in their sexual behaviour. It's too easy for men to take it out on the woman closest to them. A boyish prank? An innocent joke? Not on Ludvik's life. He is soon brought up on charges at his Party cell and slyly excoriated by a friend and comrade, Pavel. Party and university expel poor Ludvik, and he is shipped off, for ideological rectification,

In the present, Jahn successfully seduces Helena, motivated more by a desire for revenge on Pavel than attraction to her. Though Helena falls in love with him, he discovers that she and Pavel have long been estranged, and Pavel has a new lover of his own. The only person hurt by Jahn's attempt at revenge is Helena.Ludvik discovers that Pavel is quite content to have the tiresome Helena taken off his hands by a lover - the effort at revenge thereby collapsing into still another bad joke at Ludvik's expense. The Ride of the Kings turns out to be a skimpy affair Mr. Kundera's preface to this new edition of ''The Joke'' starts with an anecdote: ''When, in 1980, during a television panel devoted to my work, someone called 'The Joke' a 'major indictment of Stalinism,' The manuscript was completed in 1965 in Prague, but complaints from censors delayed its publication in Czechoslovakia until 1967. It was then banned in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded and crushed the Prague Spring. After some years of pushing for reform, Kundera fled to Paris in 1975, and his Czech citizenship was revoked. [2]