The Joke by Milan Kundera

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Milan Kundera's The Joke is a complicated novel. It takes place against a background of initial enthusiasm over the Communist Party takeover of Czechoslovakia, which is replaced by disillusion as authoritarianism and bureaucratic corruption create a state of decay.

Ludvik, the main character, is a faithful member of the Communist party and a true believer. The "joke" that sparks the novel's action is a silly, snide comment on a postcard that he writes in frustration to provoke an infuriatingly humorless love interest: "Optimism is the opiate of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!"

Seeing this as a statement against the party, she hands it over to the authorities. Ludvik's friends then turn against him, and he is expelled from the party and sent to work in the mines at a military camp. His anger consumes him and years later, once he is out and living comfortably, he sees an opportunity to get revenge on a former friend who betrayed him. He seizes it and commits a cringey, despicable act with disastrous results.

The book's title works on many levels. Beyond the postcard that serves as the spark for the novel's action, the bigger joke is on Ludvik, and on greater society for embracing a corrosive, destructive force that crushes their souls. Trotsky advocated for a decentralized form of planning that focused on workers' control. He criticized the bureaucracy and anti-democratic tendencies of the Soviet state, believing in continuous change driven by workers. Over the course of his life, he was arrested, exiled, and eventually assassinated in 1940 by a Stalinist agent. Trotsky was an idealist crushed by the power of the state, and Ludvik can be seen in much the same way. Despite the novel's age (it came out in 1967, delayed for two years by the Communist party) and setting, it serves as a chillingly relevant cautionary tale for us today.

The Joke works simultaneously on personal, philosophical, and societal levels. Its critiques about how both capitalism and communism, when used in the wrong ways, can harm the individual, are sobering. But it is a bit clunky and difficult to get through. This was Kundera's first novel, and it's told from four different points of view, which can be confusing, as their voices aren't easy to tell apart. The last section rotates among three perspectives without any of the headers that preceded it, and I had trouble distinguishing two of the voices except from the context of their stories. The fourth perspective, which appears only in one fairly long, solid block, is almost an authorial voice, revealing secrets about Ludvik's love interest from years ago that Ludvik never had any idea about. How the man came to know about this and then convey it to Ludvik depends on ridiculous coincidences, although it was probably the most entertaining part of the book.



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