The most striking feature about The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the daring way Kundera blends modes or shifts about from one mode to another — history, autobiography, fictional narrative, philosophical commentary, and fantasy. The different modes give the novel great variety and complexity, but at the same time, as different approaches to the same themes, the modes reinforce each other. For example, the fantasy of the island of children, who symbolize the final result of the totalitarian state ("and perhaps our entire technical age," as Kundera says in an afterword to the Penguin edition), gains its context from and sums up the other stories. The novel also has seven sections, each containing a separate narrative (two dealing with Tamina) that could stand alone, but together they again reinforce each other through their parallels and contrasts. Borrowing a term from music, Kundera describes the novel as "a...