Rating: 
Summary: For the love of life...
Review: When I picked up this book for perusal, it had been quite a while since I experienced a love affair with a novel. _The Joke_ turned out to be an exquisite, tasteful, and tasty treat. I was enthralled by it for days, impatiently longing for a quiet hour to settle down with this remarkable text. Neither wishing, nor willing to put it down, I gluttonously consumed the last few chapters and found myself in tears over the concluding pages. Kundera is undeniably a great stylist, a skilled storyteller, and an unusually sensitive and compassionate author. _The Joke_ encompases so many things truly great novels tend to possess - profundity, elegance, memorable characters - to name but a few. It enlightens, prompts contemplation, and provides much eclectic food for thought. The ardent discussion of Moravian folklore and musical traditions is incredibly insightful and very accessible. Both subdued and volatile, this novel is an experience - in literature and in life - that is not to be missed.
Rating: 
Summary: Well Written Book Has HUGE Ego
Review: While reading the Joke I was spellbound. The book itself was fantastic. It was well written, interesting, well-paced, and moving. The ideas conveyed within the story are especially vivid and yet are described so brilliantly that many appear only as subtle reflections in a small sentence.
The reason, however that I cannot award this book its proper 4-5 stars, is because of what someone else has already said. Whoever said that Kundera has a terribly huge ego was absolutely right. In the author's note he complains how annoying it was for him to be published and mistranslated, which while certainly reason to complain there seems to be a very crisp wave of arrogance. He goes so far as to say he left one of his publishers simply because they wished to change a few of his semi-colons to periods.
Shame on you Kundera, if only it were not for your narciccistic ways your books would be so wonderful, please remove that author's note and let us enjoy the book... not despise the author!
Rating: 
Summary: The premiere novel of a world famous novelist.
Review: _The Joke_ is the first, and most traditional, novel by
Milan Kundera, the well-known author of _The Unbearable
Lightness of Being_. The story of a man who is sent to prison after he sends his girlfriend what he thinks are
humorous remarks about Soviet philosophy on a postcard,
this book shows the influence of Kafka as Kundera ruthlessly brings the absurdity of life in a totalitarian
state to an end that comes not with a bang but with a
whimper. This new edition corrects serious errors made in
the first translation, and which Kundera describes in his
introduction.
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.
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