"A man possessed by peace never stops smiling."

Magic realism, an artistic genre, most popular among modern Latin-American fiction fuses magical elements or illogical events with a realistic setting. This style of storytelling has been enthusiastically embraced by a few English writers, especially women who have strong views of gender. It was imported into British fiction from the "outside" rather than appearing spontaneously due to the country's relatively "untraumatic" modern history. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1976) the author Milan Kundera remarked that he had seen "a circle of dancers rise into the air and float away." However, we know this to be an impossible event. The ring of dancers rise from the ground and float into the sky. We delay our common sense or disbelief because the event sounds so powerful. The expressed emotions we feel have been built up over the previous pages. Milan Kundera was one of the many Czechs who celebrated the move of the Communist Party into mainstream society in 1948. Many were hopeful it would create a brave new world of freedom and justice. Milan was soon expelled from the party, and these emotions are often explored in his writing. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting he writes about the public ironies and private tragedies of post-war Czech, and moves spontaneously between reality and fantasy. His image of the rising dancers epitomizes the absurd self-deception of the members of the Communist Party; their apprehension to declare their own purity and innocence. As well as their determination to ignore all the issues of the political system in which they belong. It is often said that this fantasy image expresses the envy and loneliness of the author who was banished from ever being able to participate in their euphoria and safety of their dance. One of Kundera's most likable characteristics is that he never takes the martyr position, and he never underestimates the human cost of being a nonconformist.