“Joking” Milan Kundera
Shakaja Milan Kundera
Prague, a day after the 1948 coup. Student Ludwik’s overthrow begins with a joke, an ironic bullet on socialist optimism sent to a lovely girl, who takes this very seriously. He is expelled from the party and forced to drop out of school. He works two years in the mines, where his life takes a completely different direction from what the boy had imagined for his future. When all the threads of his existence seem broken, he meets Lucian, “whose dream had been cut in half.” She steals flowers for him in the cemetery and offers him a sweet, enigmatic and impenetrable love. He loses it because he does not know how to understand it. He will realize, years later, Helena, the woman whom, coldly, Ludwig will use as a means of his revenge. Joke, Kundera’s best novel, a radiograph of the communist system in Czechoslovakia, published and republished in many other parts of the world. “Personal stories, when they happen, do they have to say anything? For all my skepticism, I have a little bit of irrational superstition left, such as this strange belief that every event that happens to me must also have a meaning; that life tells us through adventure. it reveals to us little by little a secret; it is presented as a crossword puzzle to be solved, that the stories we live in create at the same time the mythology of our lives and that this mythology holds the key to truth and mystery.Is it an illusion? it may even, but it does not suppress this need to constantly decipher my life. ” Excerpt from the book
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