Laughable Loves

"Laughable Loves" was originally published in three separate editions with a total of ten stories. Eventually, three of the stories were dropped and the order of the last two pairs of stories was switched. Kundera, by making these changes, tried to combine the stories into one unified work, like "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting." It didn't work. The seven stories are, frankly, not connected. They give a good picture of life in Czechoslovakia at the time, but combining to form a picture of a life in a certain period at a certain place does not make one unified work. It's a collection of short stories, not a single novel. But who cares! Erotic, comic, frightening, lighthearted, perceptive - all of these and more are easily applicable adjectives (for, for example, "Symposium," "Nobody Will Laugh," "The Hitchiking Game," "The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire," and "Eduard and God" respectively). The short stories are above all interesting and not as tough-to-read (some would say pompous and pseudo-intellectual) as Kundera's later works. The two best stories are "Eduard and God" and "The Hitchiking Game." "Symposium" isn't far behind. It's fun, it's literary but neither boring nor pretentious - enjoy!

Laughable Loves makes for a brilliant pocket edition of Kundera: bitsized chunks of surreal yet less complex stories that, in a typically Kundera manner, are delectably introspective yet comic. Kundera is one of the handful of authors who so can smoothly shift the reader from mundane concerns into latent madness as to almost challenge one's faith in the material world. His world is spare, unadorned, almost like a room that needs to be furnished by our own mind. Games, dreams and schemes abound in all these little stories as different characters react in different ways to romantic impulses. Part preposterous, part enchanting, but never for a moment boring. I highly recommended this volume of laughable loves that will leave you thinking long after your grins have turned in for the night.

"We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded." says Kundera. Most of the characters in this collection of seven great stories are blind in one way or another. If they happen to be wise, they turn out, after all, to be unbearably light, chasing after women, embracing men, for no purpose whatsoever other than that is what they seem destined to do. Their perspectives on themselves are often pitifully unrealistic, hence the stories tend to center around misunderstandings. The men can't break the habit of "continuing conquest". The women seem remarkably prone to give in. Even when the men are happily married, the chase still beckons. With great humor and wit, with a lot of philosophical depth, Kundera traces the mentality of various Czechs in different walks of life in the 1960s through the medium of their sometimes tawdry love life. Tales of would-be conquests turn out to be critiques of society, questions about the meaning of life, or witty perspectives on the old theme of youth vs. age. Great Romeos turn out to be duds, burnt-out old flames can be lit again. Eroticism is not what it is cracked up to be, but sometimes it's more than we expect. Great stuff. Maybe it's a special Czech style of writing about love, maybe it's that wry, ironic humor found in Hasek and Skvorecky that I've always liked, but Kundera's characters lack the aggression, material concerns, or passion for commitment found in American novels as well as lacking the love of style found in the French. They are simply average people with limitless libido. So are they average ? That one is up to you. In a story about how desire for a girl makes a young man invent a religious fervor, then defend it to the local Party committee, winding up in bed with his boss, who is supposed to purge him of religion, Kundera turns away from the plot to write...."it seemed to Eduard that [the girl's religious] ideas were in fact only a veneer on her destiny, and her destiny only a veneer on her body; he saw her as an accidental conjunction of a body, ideas, and a life's course, an inorganic structure, arbitrary and unstable. ....He saw her as an ink line, spreading on a blotter: without contours, without shape." The skill of a man who can stick lines like this into a story which STILL manages to entertain has to be seen to be believed. Each story provides its own stock of surprises. This is the first book by Kundera I've ever read. It certainly won't be the last.

Este es uno de los primeros libros de Kundera y eso se nota. Claro que para los aficionados al checo, los pecados de juventud del autor son un agradable paseo por los recursos kunderianos. "La insoportable brevedad del cuento" no parece ser el vehículo ideal para las pasiones lentamente informadas por Milan Kundera. De todos modos, la soberbia madurez de sus novelas posteriores ya se prefigura en estos seres que aman con una intensidad carnal, humana.

I can not stop wondering how Milan Kundera takes penetrating glimpses at love's triumphs and tragedies that we so often pass by without any acknowledgement. In the love stories of ordinary people he brings up the desperate longing for closeness and warmth of having a partner by one's side; a partner in love or friendship to find a shelter from everything else. The eroticism of the book is not just a sexual instinct of a male. It envelopes the reader in a sad and sweet embrace of the mundane events drenched with it; the events that we fail to recognize as turning points of our lives. Milan Kundera seems to be saying every time, "Look around! You do not have to watch movies to experince strong passions because they are around you every single minute."