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    The Joke

    4.4 15

    by Milan Kundera


    Paperback

    (Reprint)

    $13.99
    $13.99

    Temporarily Out of Stock Online

    Customer Reviews

    • ISBN-13: 9780060995058
    • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
    • Publication date: 12/28/2013
    • Series: Harper Perennial
    • Edition description: Reprint
    • Pages: 336
    • Sales rank: 83,086
    • Product dimensions: 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.75(d)

    The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves—all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.

    Brief Biography

    Hometown:
    Paris, France
    Date of Birth:
    April 1, 1929
    Place of Birth:
    Brno, Czechoslovakia
    Education:
    Undergraduate degree in philosophy, Charles University, Prague, 1952

    Table of Contents

    Author's Note vii
    Ludvik
    1(12)
    Helena
    13(14)
    Ludvik
    27(92)
    Jaroslav
    119(42)
    Ludvik
    161(44)
    Kostka
    205(42)
    Ludvik, Jaroslav, Helena
    247
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    All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.

    The present edition provides English-language readers an important further means toward revaluation of The Joke. For reasons he describes in his Author's Note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating (with the assistance of his American publisher-editor) a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also to the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel's narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.

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