The Joke
Ludvik Jahn, a promising student in Communist Czechoslovakia, sends a girl a postcard mocking her earnestness with three flippant lines about optimism and Trotsky, and is expelled from the party, the university and into a punishment battalion in the mines. Fifteen years later he comes back to his Moravian home town having arranged to seduce the wife of the man who raised a hand against him. Four voices tell it, and the folk rituals Kundera loved run under the political farce.
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Closest analogues
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- 44% · 10 shared