SOURCE: “Songs of Exile and Return,” in Time, April 16, 1984, p. 77.

In the following positive review, Gray notes the similarities between The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in the U.S. in 1980, author Milan Kundera brilliantly fused passion and playfulness. That book's collection of seven loosely related stories danced around a central, somber event: the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The resulting oppression halted the liberal reforms that blossomed during the famous Prague Spring of 1968 and eventually drove a number of intellectuals and artists, including Kundera, from their native country. Songs of exile are sad, by definition. Yet Kundera's added a comic vision capable of seeing both oppressors and oppressed locked in battle against a common enemy, the bizarre senselessness of a world in which all human choices lead to debacles.

The tale of that struggle...