The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is an ode to innocence and poetry. Milan Kundera wrote the novel in 1978. From his long perspective far away in France, after the political struggles of the late sixties, the author examines the impact of Communism in (then) Czechoslovakia. Most of all, however, the book is full of characters grappling with innocence. In an episode that recalls The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tamina is lead to an island full of children, and plays with them intimately until she cannot bear how "sensuality becomes absurd, innocence becomes absurd", and disappears into the water. Kundera also invokes the story of the innocent lovers Daphnis and Chloe, who lie together naked, "aroused, their hearts are pounding, but they do not know what it is to make love".