This edition provides English-language readers an important further means toward revaluation of The Joke.

Now, more than 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 Milan Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.

And he says it with passion, with good humor, and with love.' -Salman Rushdie All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Milan Kundera is an artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere, who says that the good (and evil) that issues from men's souls matters much more than the deeds of a State. The fresh descriptions and masterful employment of several narrators testify to Kundera's power as a novelist, unmistakable even in this early work.'A thoughtful, intricate, ambivalent novel with the reach of greatness in it.' -John Updike 'It is impossible to do justice here to the subtleties, comedy, and wisdom of this very beautiful novel. Years later, after he has resumed his studies and become a successful scientist, his lingering anger at the man who engineered his expulsion culminates in an act of destructive sexual revenge that serves only to show Ludvik he has never really understood any woman and is indeed the butt of one of history's many cruel jokes. He is expelled from the Communist Party, forced to leave the university and join a special army unit with other enemies of the state.

Looking back on the tense, McCarthy-like atmosphere of the late 1940s, it chronicles the disastrous results of Ludvik's prankish postcard to a girlfriend criticizing the Czech communist regime. In this new English-language version of Kundera's classic first novel, completely revised by the author to incorporate the most accurate portions of two previous translations plus his own corrections, the narrator Ludvik wonders, ``What if History plays jokes?'' This politically charged question, coupled with Ludvik's fate as an unintentional dissident, struck a chord in Czech readers the novel's 1967 publication was a key literary event of the Prague Spring.

The joke book by milan kundera