“Kundera, now 88 years old, left Communist Czechoslovakia in 1975 after he was dismissed from his teaching position and had seen his books banned. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in French in 1979. Two years later it was released in Czech by a Canadian publisher – but it has never actually been published in Kundera’s homeland. It is reportedly hard even today to obtain in the Czech Republic.” That, at last, is about to change.