The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Richmond Hoxie
About this listen
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
©1978 Milan Kundera; translation copyright 1996, Aaron Asher (P)2012 HarperCollinsPublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
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Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
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Steppenwolf
- By: Hermann Hesse
- Narrated by: Peter Weller
- Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically when he meets a woman who is his opposite, the carefree and elusive Hermine.
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Save this Hesse novel for your midlife crisis.
- By Darwin8u on 03-02-14
By: Hermann Hesse
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Siddhartha
- Booktrack Edition
- By: Hermann Hesse
- Narrated by: Paul Ansdell
- Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Siddhartha, the ninth book written by Hermann Hesse, is about a young Indian boy who leaves his home in hopes of finding enlightenment with the wise "Goutama", which in this story is the Buddha. After learning what he can from Goutama, he decides to go off into the busy city and leads a life of greed and lust. When he realizes that the lifestyle is not fulfilling, and he reflects on his life, he goes to a river and contemplates suicide. However, it is here that Siddhartha meets a man who will change his life and help lead him to enlightenment.
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One of a Kind
- By Anonymous User on 04-04-20
By: Hermann Hesse
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The First Man
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In The First Man, Albert Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds, and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. The result is a moving journey through the lost landscape of youth that also discloses the wellsprings of Camus's aesthetic powers and moral vision.
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Great Narration by Jefferson Mays
- By Sean Patrick Stevens on 07-31-21
By: Albert Camus
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Martin Eden
- By: Jack London
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 14 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Martin Eden, Jack London’s semiautobiographical novel, is about a struggling young writer. It is considered by many to be the author’s most mature work. Personifying London’s own dreams of education and literary fame as a young man in San Francisco, Martin Eden’s impassioned but ultimately ineffective battle to overcome his bleak circumstances makes him one of the most memorable and poignant characters Jack London ever created.
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My favorite Jack London book.
- By j daly on 11-26-14
By: Jack London
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The Sum of Our Days
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Blair Brown, Isabel Allende
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and as full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul while sharing her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory - and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.
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She does not disappoint
- By ChiChi's Rule on 06-01-22
By: Isabel Allende
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The Golden Notebook
- By: Doris Lessing
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 27 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Author Anna Wulf attempts to overcome writer’s block by writing a comprehensive "golden notebook" that draws together the preoccupations of her life, each of which is examined in a different notebook. Anna’s struggle to unify the various strands of her life – emotional, political, and professional – amasses into a fascinating encyclopaedia of female experience in the ‘50s.
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Transcendent narration of a masterpiece.
- By @vmarinelli on 07-03-12
By: Doris Lessing
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Pages for You
- The Pages for You Series, Book 1
- By: Sylvia Brownrigg
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 6 hrs
- Unabridged
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In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. The 17-year-old, new to everything around her - college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life - is shocked by her desire to follow this wherever it will take her.
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A gorgeous listen
- By MissLynn on 03-09-20
By: Sylvia Brownrigg
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Death in Venice
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: Peter Batchelor
- Length: 3 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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A stunningly beautiful youth and the city of Venice set the stage for Thomas Mann’s introspective examination of erotic love and philosophical wisdom.
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A problem with the narration
- By Erez on 03-19-12
By: Thomas Mann
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Myra Breckinridge
- A Novel (Myra and Myron, Book 1)
- By: Gore Vidal, Camille Paglia - introduction
- Narrated by: Michelle Hendley, Camille Paglia
- Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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"I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess." So begins the irresistible testimony of the luscious instructor of Empathy and Posture at Buck Loner's Academy of Drama and Modeling. Myra has a secret that only her surgeon shares; a passion for classic Hollywood films, which she regards as the supreme achievements of Western culture; and a sacred mission to bring heteronormative civilization to its knees. Fifty years after its first publication unleashed gales of laughter, delight, and ferocious dissent, Myra's moment to instruct and delight has once again arrived.
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Well performed
- By Kenny D on 06-08-19
By: Gore Vidal, and others
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Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
- A Novel
- By: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Jull Costa Margaret - translator, Robin Patterson - translator
- Narrated by: Ramon De Ocampo
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Machado de Assis’ classic novel, the precursor of Latin American fiction, is finally rendered as a stunningly relevant work for 21st-century audiences. In eloquent, contemporary prose, Costa and Patterson breathe new life into the dynamic character of Brás Cubas and reveal the vivid, tempestuous Rio de Janeiro of his time. The recently deceased Cubas narrates his life story, admitting glibly: “I am not so much a writer who has died, as a dead man who has decided to write.”
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Incredible story from an incredible author
- By Anonymous User on 01-01-21
By: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and others
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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.
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A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
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Really hard to follow
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By: Milan Kundera
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Slowness
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Well done
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By: Milan Kundera, and others
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For decades, Peter F. Drucker was widely regarded as "the dean of this country's business and management philosophers" ( Wall Street Journal). In this concise and brilliant work, he looks to the most influential position in management - the executive. The measure of the executive, Drucker reminds us, is the ability to "get the right things done". This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked as well as avoiding what is unproductive.
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Identity
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Overall
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There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognize the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is erased while we simultaneously doubt our own. This also happens with couples - indeed, above all with couples, because lovers fear more than anything else "losing sight" of the loved one. With stunning artfulness in expanding and playing variations on the meaningful moment, Milan Kundera has made this situation - and the vague sense of panic it inspires - the very fabric of this novel.
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Interesting
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Stories of Your Life and Others presents characters who must confront sudden change-the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens-while striving to maintain some sense of normalcy. In the amazing and much-lauded title story (the basis for the 2016 movie Arrival), a grieving mother copes with divorce and the death of her daughter by drawing on her knowledge of alien languages and non-linear memory recollection.
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Awareness awakens you to the truth that you possess everything you need right now to be happy and fulfilled. Happiness is your natural state. You don't need to do anything to acquire it; you only need to drop something. This audiobook shows you what that is. There is not a single person who ever gave time to being aware who’s quality of life didn't change. You see life differently because you are different. You respond to people and situations differently. You see things you have never seen before. Beautiful things. You're much more energetic, much more alive.
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Amazing presentation. So happy for the audio!
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Close Range
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Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In "The Mud Below", a rodeo rider's obsession marks the deepening fissures between his family life and self-imposed isolation. In "The Half-Skinned Steer", an elderly fool drives west to the ranch he grew up on for his brother's funeral, and dies a mile from home.
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A Wonderfully Ironic and Surprising Read
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Exhalation
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Tackling some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine, these stories will change the way you think, feel, and see the world. They are Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic, revelatory. Ted Chiang tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine.
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Masterful and singular
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How to Change Your Mind
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When Michael Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such as depression, addiction, and anxiety, he did not intend to write what is undoubtedly his most personal book. But upon discovering how these remarkable substances are improving the lives not only of the mentally ill but also of healthy people coming to grips with the challenges of everyday life, he decided to explore the landscape of the mind in the first person as well as the third.
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A delightful trip
- By Paul E. Williams on 05-19-18
By: Michael Pollan
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The Brothers Karamazov
- Penguin Classics
- By: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, David McDuff - translator
- Narrated by: Luke Thompson
- Length: 43 hrs and 6 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for parricide; Ivan, the intellectual, driven to breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to heal the family's rifts; and the shadowy figure of their bastard half-brother, Smerdyakov. Dostoyevsky's dark masterwork evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur and everyone's faith in humanity is tested.
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Fix an error near the end of chapter 7.
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What listeners say about The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Baron
- 06-08-20
Brilliant but/and complex,
Narration superb, ideas and questions outstanding, story line... a bit hard to follow, and that gets in the way.
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- W Perry Hall
- 03-05-17
Too Much Authorial Prodding
3.5 stars. I'm aware this is a philosophical novel, important in criticizing the Czech communist regime then in power and, indeed, resulted in that regime's revocation of Kundera's citizenship.
Nonetheless, I cannot in good conscience give a novel 4 or 5 stars on that basis when I dislike the type of author interactivity in a work of fiction that pervades this "novel." That is to say, I have a hard time reading as a story, i.e., enjoying or being vivified by a fictional narrative in which the author repeatedly reminds me that he is making it all up, such as saying why he picked out this name or that and why he decided the character would take off her clothes in a public place or make whoopee with the protagonist or go to an island of misfit 12 year old boys, be made to disrobe then be touched repeatedly and privately as a kind of gross anti-goddess.
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- Phillip Barnard
- 11-11-19
Kundera Never Disappoints.
Just amazing. People who don’t appreciate Kundera are to me just simply stupid. Richmond Hoxie gives beautiful life and richness to Kundera’s works of art.
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- HIYBRID
- 02-09-13
Mostly Forgetting....
Not a rivetting experience for me. But then I though F.Scott was a bit wishy washy because his characters were lost. Maybe that's what I feel here. If you are chasing Kundera to understand him, go ahead. It didn't make a lasting impression on me.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Greg
- 10-06-21
Thoroughly enjoyed
Enjoyed it enough to try more books by the author.
This was my first and I found the characters to share a lot of those weird thoughts we all have that don't share.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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- Darwin8u
- 04-26-14
A well-lubricated orgy of ideas
Brilliant in parts, but also messy and uneven. It is a twisting novel of lovers, sex, names, poets, poltiics, borders, history, memory, nations and being. It slides from one original idea into another like remote lovers in a well-lubricated orgy of ideas. I don't know if it loses me because I loved The Unbearable Lightness of Being so much more, or if Kundera just failed to grab me by the intellectual shorthairs. I'm almost positive I would probably rate it higher if I had the chance to tease out the flesh a bit more. It reads (not in specifics, just in style and tone) like someone took several Wim Wenders films and randomly spliced pieces from his oevre; sometimes backwards, sometimes upsidedown, frequently disorienting.
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16 people found this helpful
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- Ted Meredith
- 06-04-13
Kundera Masterpiece
Where does The Book of Laughter and Forgetting rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
I love Milan Kundera. Love, love love.
I'll admit this book is a bit choppy, not your typical novel, a bit heady over hearty.
But that's why it's my favorite of his books, and it was great to hear life breathed into it by Richmond Hoxie.
What other book might you compare The Book of Laughter and Forgetting to and why?
If you liked this you'll love The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality, or Farewell Waltz - some of Kundera's more approachable works.
But for me, this one is tops.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Placeholder
- 04-03-24
Lots of history
The book Was a snapshot of that time but was wanted a larger perspective too,
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- Viola B.
- 06-26-24
Surprisingly boring, poorly written (stiff), imitative of other authors, pretentious.
Disappointed. I wish I could return for my Audible credit back. Left me wondering if all Kundera’s works are at this mediocre level and how he became acclaimed.
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- Diana Dellos
- 01-30-24
Dull and confusing
Hard to follow the many stories, full of patriarchy (written in mid 70’s), odd sexual stories. Just didn’t enjoy it at all. Read for a book club.
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