The Joke

One of the most captivating books I have read in a long time, The Joke has re-affirmed my faith in Milan Kundera’s prowess as an exceptional author. And this is just the second book of his that I have read. I read it in two days. The only books that I have read so fast are Jude the Obscure and Crime and Punishment.

The Joke is not merely a story, it is a depiction of a time that not only changed the world, but also obliterated many individual destinies. It is an ideological struggle between the self and the circumstance. It also deals with nihility of vengeance. Written in first-person, the story is told by various characters, garbed in the shadows of their own polarities. But Ludvik is the main character that carries the burden of The Joke.

Kundera doesn’t believe in linear narrations and he mentioned it in Immortality which he wrote much later on, and which I read prior to reading The Joke. Although the story begins with Ludvik coming to his place-of-birth to take revenge, the entire story unfolds as a recall.

The recall starts in Czechoslovakia when communism is at its peak in the country. The vile bourgeois has been overthrown and the era of the proletariat has descended upon the civilization. You are either loyal to the state, or you are the enemy of the state — there is no middle path, there is no scope for ambiguity.

Ludvik is a university student as well as a respected office-bearer of the communist party. He is an active comrade. He has a girlfriend, Marketa, who also is a perpetually serious party worker. During the courtship, when the young Ludvik is craving to have a physical contact with Marketa, she is sent to a two-week party training course. While Ludvik seethes with frustration, she writes to him that she’s having a great time. In a fit a jealousy, he writes to her on a postcard:

Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.

He considers it a joke and forgets about it. This joke changes his life forever.

The postcard falls in the hands of the authorities. After an unfair party trial where all his friends and acquaintances, including a very close acquaintance, Zemanek, raise their hands in favor of his expulsion from the university and banishment from the party. Marketa testifies against him. He is branded as the enemy of the cause. Not only that, he is sent to harsh military service where he has to work in a mine and where he goes through numerous humiliations and a traumatic love affair. He is left a bitter man.

He loses his trust in all human relations. There are no friends and no lovers for him. He exists only to take revenge. By the end of the story, he realizes how futile his pursuit has been.

Kundera wrote this novel when communist suppression was at its peak. He was not allowed to publish the original version of this book. His passport was confiscated (not necessarily for writing this) and he was not allowed to leave the country. He has attempted to convey through this novel how a noble ideology was transmogrified into a grotesque historical blot by power hungry, misguided communists.

Even when the translations were published in the UK and the US, they were not up to the mark — they were translated to cater to the taste of the market. This is the fifth edition that I read and Kundera said he was most satisfied by this.