Laughable Loves
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Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 891.86354
EAN: 9780060997038
ISBN: 0060997036
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: 1999-05
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release Date: 1999-08-25
Studio: Harper Perennial
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Editorial Reviews:
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Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road--only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone home to his wife. Games, fantasies, and schemes abound in all the stories while different characters react in varying ways to the sudden release of erotic impulses.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Finding Humor in the Erotic Impulse.
Comment: "When it comes to commerce, the erotic is a touchy issue, because while everyone may covet the erotic life, everyone also hates it as the source of their troubles, their frustrations, their yearnings, their complexes, their sufferings" Milan Kundera, Identity (p. 51).
With his European sensibility, Milan Kundera appreciates the humorous nature of the libido. Best known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel, Kundera's 1969 collection of seven short stories, Laughable Loves (Smìsné lásky), reveals the humor in the erotic impulse that drives romantic relationships. In one story, a young professor who plays mind-games with people he considers inferior loses his lover only after realizing he loves her. In another, "The Hitchhiking Game," a couple plays a game intended to excite them, but which causes them to lose interest in one another. In "Let the Old Dead make way for The Young Dead," a widow visits her husband's grave, only to discover that it has been removed and replaced with another grave of a man who had died "more recently." This act of vulgarity prompts her to visit a former lover. Two stories follow the sexual exploits of a Don Juan, Dr. Havel. In one he rejects a nurse, and in the other set ten years later, while middle-aged and losing confidence in himself, his young, beautiful wife reminds him that he is still attractive. Another story examines the flirtations of two middle-age men. One is happily married, and the other is more interested in books than women. In "Eduard and God," the title character places his teaching job in jeopardy by accompanying his religious girlfriend to church. After jilting her, Eduard yearns for God. These intelligent love stories are quintessential Kundera.
G. Merritt
Customer Rating:
Summary: Love Advice from a Man of the World
Comment: Milan Kundera is, perhaps, what Woody Allen probably wishes he were: a non-neurotic European gentleman; a cool customer who knows a few things about love, and doesn't mind sharing them. And he has lived a professional life of art under a repressive Soviet bloc regime, to boot.
Laughable Loves is my first stab at Kundera, and what a find! Here is a thoroughly modern (though several decades old) collection of sketches of romance young and old, foibles and conceits timeless and ubiquitous, and comedy blatant and tongue-in-cheek. The book starts out modestly with young couple whose blithe role-playing takes them to darker places in their hearts and minds than they'd ever imagined. Kundera then gives us a pompous professor/art critic who goes to great lengths to avoid a man who solicits his critique while halfheartedly protecting his young mistress; a bitter man who seeks to recapture a love he once let get away; a doctor, ex-Don Juan, who is full of himself and, ultimately, full of IT; and, among others, an atheist teacher who flirts with religion to get close to a girl, and flirts with the principal to save his career, with unexpected results.
The stories are metaphysical puzzles (especially Dr. Havel) and teasing meditations on love, lust, and life from a lover-philosopher. Kundera makes no apologies and explores amoral terrain with authority--and wit. What a taut, satisfying collection of short stories. The question is not whom to read next, but what to read...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Honesty, cynicism and melancholy shrouded in undescribable tenderness
Comment: I just came across this collection of short stories, and as a devoted Kundera fan, I quickly devoured it amidst Christmas preparations, letter writings and other more dreary readings. And what a delight! This is early Bohemian Kundera, written while he still lived in then Czechoslovakia, and it is quite evident that he has not yet matured into the thoroughly seasoned writer that produced masterpieces such as "Life is Elsewhere", "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Immortality". However, this is unmistakenly literary genius in the making, and the mood throughout is simply captivating.
The themes all deal with aspects of human sexuality - mostly from a Man's view. The stories have a raw sense of humanity to them - sometimes it can be uncomfortable reading; however, it has an undeniably tender undercurrent. Even when a character behaves despicably, I remained sympathtic with the human behind the actions. It just feels irresistably honest, and it is quite easy to get seduced by such well-portrayed human complexities.
Among my favorite stories were "The Old Dead Must Make Room for the New Dead", which portrays the dilemma of whether to preserve a diffuse, but beautiful sensual memory or replace it with a graphic, but uglier version that will ultimately erase the former. "Edward and God" is another gem that deals with sexual longing and the fickleness of Religion (Atheism is cleverly presented just as irrational in its dogmatisms as Christianity).
Finally "The Hitchhiking Game" is a classic portrayal of how easily perceptions can be irreversibly altered.
I highly recommend this short-story collection; however, if you are reading Milan Kundera for the first time, I am tempted to recommened one of his more famous works...
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Early Kundera, including one of the century's greatest stories.
Comment: This collection of early short stories by Czech novelist Milan Kundera (who should surely be in the running for a Nobel sometime soon) contains one of the greatest short stories of the 20th century. "The Hitchhiking Game," a tale of two lovers who play an identity game that goes much too far and shakes their own fragile identities, is a marvelous, unpretentious dramatization of one of the central themes of Modernism's most important philosophical movement, Existentialism. Here Sartre's idea that we define ourselves through our actions is combined with the notion of personality as social performance to create a work of art as startling as Ingmar Bergman's 'Persona'. P.S.: I understand that Kundera also directed a film of this story sometime in the 1960's--part of the 'Czech new wave' cinema movement.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not Laughter and Forgetting...
Comment: "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!
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