Rating: 
Summary: Painfully Beautiful
Review: "The Joke" is a marvel. It is moving, lovely, engaging, bittersweet, and at times even laugh out loud funny. It is irresistably readable. Unlike some of Kundera's other works, which can get horrifically and unsatisfyingly complex, "The Joke" is first and foremost meant to be *read.*
One does not have to have a particular political interest to enjoy this book, either. It is a story about love and humanity and the eternal question of how to live. Ludvik's life is changed because of his apparent opposition to Communism, but it is not at heart a political work at all.
If you love to get lost in a good book, especially one that really makes you think and feel, pick up "The Joke." You won't be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Very Poetic ( An Excerpt )
Review: 'The Joke' comes almost as close to 'The Lightness". Often times I woke up to realize I was reading Kundera and not Kafka ! I envy Kundera for how poetically he tells the story of an young communist , ludvik, his innocent 'joke' - and how that ultimately changes his life. Here is one of the excerpts from the novel , I liked so much - This is how the entire novel is like !As soon as he got to Prague, he pounced on his wife ( I call her his wife, but she actually was just another nineteen year old girl) and she admitted everything brazently ( perhaps even eagerly ); He started beating her; she fought back; he started chocking her and smashed a bottle over her head; she fell to the floor and lay there motionless.He immediatly realised what he had done, panicked, and fled. Shomehow or other he found an empty summer cottage in the mountains and holed up there in terrified anticipation of being caught and hanged for murder. When they found him two months later, they put him on trial for desertion rather than murder.His wife, it turns out, has regained conciousness shortly after he ran out and had nothing to show for the adventure than a bump in the head. While he was serving his time, she divorced him and today he she the wife of a famous Prague actor. I go to his plays from time to time just to remind myself of Stanza and his unhappy end. After his term of service was up he stayed on in the mines; an accident cost him a leg, the amputation took his life.
Rating: 
Summary: Good but not Kundera at his height
Review: 'The Joke' is, no doubt, a fine book. Yet compared to Kundera's other works, it fails to impress me. The plot lacks the subtle and surprising turns which 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', 'Immortality' or even 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' contained. If you are really after the "real" Kundera, read 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" - you will discover the best book you will ever have read.
Rating:
Summary: Thought - provoking
Review: A beautiful book about the eternal human search for meaning in a short-lived society that claimed to have all the answers.
Rating:
Summary: Kundera¿s first novel, and maybe one of his best.
Review: After reading several books by Kundera -one of my favorite authors-, I decided to try his first novel, "The Joke". Because it's the first one, its natural that the style would differ from his latest production...however, the author is the same and the style is similar in all of his work, he explores human thoughts and emotions beautifully, maybe not in a such profound way like Dostoievsky or Hesse, but close enough to be in the same league. If you want a detail of the plot (I personally don't like to do that before reading a book), you will probably find that in other reviews, I'll just said that the story is about a man that lost all of his achievements just for a misunderstanding, a joke that was not well received in a communism society. Kundera explores the thoughts of this man (in several time periods of his life), but also takes other characters and gives them a protagonic level (the story is written in first person, in the view of all of the characters). The book gets more and more interesting as it develops, and the climax is at the end, the last 50 pages are brilliant. A dramatic story with a great end. Five stars for the way Kundera allow readers to get to know and love his characters.....brilliant narrative, brilliant book.
Rating:
Summary: A magic art of Kundera to capture our personal feeling.
Review: Because of a joke, Ludvik is accused of having betrayed his party. When he is condemned he loses every certainty realizing that any attempt of defence is useless. He renounces his own reason and lets himself be dominated by the implacable truth of the absurd. The hopes of youth, of life, are suddenly broken with the expulsion from the comunist party and the expulsion from the University studies. The experiences of reawakening finds himself on the obscure threshold of anger, hate and revenge. Overwhelmed by anguish he seeks love, and Lucie is the brief love story that moves him deeply - a tormented sentiment unable to realize love. In the end, Ludvik is ready to let himself go as a person to be made more of silence than words.
Rating:
Summary: what Kundera might've been
Review: Before he slowly became completely self-absorbed and deluded himself into thinking that he had something new to say, culminating in the awful Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera wrote The Joke, a beautifully written, painfully sad novel about an "innocent" joke that almost ruins a young man's life. It is one of the most brilliant and scathing indictments of communism I've ever read. And unlike Kundera's later works, it's a real story, where the "point" is made _through_ the story and not _over_ it. To put it bluntly, Kundera's ego doesn't steal the show. Too bad it could only happen once. A wonderful book.
Rating:
Summary: Kafka
Review: From the moment I picked up the book, all I could think about was Kafka - The Castle, Joseph K in The Trial.... Kundera could not seem to escape his Masters - Kafka, etc. The novel is as intricate as any of his works and somehow sets the stage for future pieces. By far the most political of his novels, it is not a political novel. It is a story of human existence. Kundera picks apart a particular theme, on one level Kundera can be said to be exploring a sense of the absurd. The four part novel is cleverly written in the first-person narrative. The novel centers around Ludvik and Helena and the colorful storied surrounding them and their cohorts. Kundera sets up his heros as antiheros through a series of humanizing qualities - usually self-centered. Accused of portraying his characters from a male fantasy perspective, people lose sight of the intricate stories that he weaves - part advocacy, part parody. Centered around the narrative of the joke - Ludvik, who being a dedicated communist, finds himself the victim of a joke he outlined in an open postcard to a young lady he was trying to impress. Locked in this Kafkaesque drama, his life is one tragedy after another. He becomes a skeptic. He blames history. We are thrust into a tailspin of the "absurd situation" we find ourself in. Surface as this analysis has been, kindly look to the deeply insightful comment that Kundera makes on the human condition through the use of his characters. I am certain we will all find a little of ourselves in every character. Miguel Llora
Rating:
Summary: An insight into self actualization
Review: I have always wondered about the thought process of a self actualized being. Could never make up my mind whether the term self actualization applied to Colonel Auerliano of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" or did Howard Rourke of "Fountain Head" fell into this category.You meet Ludvik in The Joke and then you get to know about the thought process of a genius; of what it is really like to be at peace with yourself. You get to learn however that indeed it is a very painful process; whether the journey is worth it or not; read for yourself.
Rating:
Summary: Insightful About Life Under Communism
Review: I learned more from this book about life under Communism than from pages and pages of political science text at college. Kundera brilliantly depicts the frustration and futility of negotiating private and public personas as is necessary in a Communist regime. I would recommend this to anyone interested in acquiring a personal understanding of life under Communism.
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