A pervasive social concern in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is life under communism, particularly the repressive type of communism imposed on the Czechs by the Russians.

Perhaps the most surprising feature about the everyday life of the Czechs, as depicted by Kundera, is their unbridled pursuit of liberated sex, including here one menage a trois and one scene of group sex. These scenes are played more for their humor than for their eroticism, and so also is a spirited and somewhat drunken meeting of the Writers' Club, where a main item of conversation is sex. Failure to get enough sex is said to form the basis of one acerbic poet's poetics, and a student who cannot pull himself away from the meeting to complete a seduction falls under the same danger. Readers may conclude that the Czechs pursue sex so avidly because (aside from...