The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera is probably best known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). The Book of Laughter & Forgetting was written just before. It is, in my opinion, his best written work. Serious yet playful, languid and yet refined, it is a masterpiece of technical and narrative control. The book is comprised of seven narratives, using a model derived from Beethoven’s musical variations. Each narrative ‘varies’ on the two central themes – laughter and forgetting – which are both picked apart for their existential and political implications. Personal crises of memory reflect larger processes of national forgetting in the bleak politics of 1970s Czechoslovakia under the Soviet bloc. Laughter becomes a weapon, a sinister double-edged sword. Nightmares proliferate and identities are lost. The book culminates in a soaring, poetic whole, driving home a damning indictment of the communist regime. Despite its themes of forgetting, a book unlikely to be forgot.

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

A wild and dizzying magnum opus, Salman’s Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children was crowned the Booker of the Bookers with justified cause. Combining magical realist techniques with the historical events of post-Independence India from 1947, Salman Rushdie tells us the story of Saleem Sinai, a boy born in Mumbai with strange magical powers, such as cross-national telepathy, and acute sense of smell. Born at the exact moment of India’s independence, Saleem’s life is irrevocably inter-woven and entwined with his country’s own fate. So begins a dazzling journey through the annals of history. An ever-vociferous narrator, Saleem gives us the lives of two generations of his family, from his grandfather Aadam Aziz in Kashmir, to his mother Mumtaz in teeming Delhi. Rushdie-via-Saleem is a generous author, populating his saga with myriad characters and profligate scenarios, a bristling crowd of dynamic people that spill out from the prose. If you invest time as readers in this dazzling book, Rushdie returns the favour of your effort in droves.