Laughable Loves (Paperback, Main)

These seven short stories by a Czech writer are artful and sometimes funny - a gallows humor based on the traditional cynicism and bureaucratism of middle-class Central Europeans, and their current view of freedom as freakishness, aphrodisia, private intrigue. Kundera's men find solace in impressing each other with seductions and humiliating women who are either young and adoring or older and concupiscent. In further variations on "the idiocy of eroticism" a demure gift starts playing the whore with her lover and the game takes over; a professor of art parries a pesky review-seeker by charging that he made advances to his mistress, whereupon the man's wife submits affidavits to the effect that such a thing would be physically impossible; a young man feigns religious conversion to surmount his girl's resistance, then is repelled by "how easily and remorselessly she was now betraying her God of No Fornication." Life, ironic but goatish, among "the old dead" and "the young dead." (Kirkus Reviews)

Laughable Loves is a collection of stories that first appeared in print in Prague before 1968, but was then banned. The seven stories are all concerned with love, or rather with the complex erotic games and stratagems employed by women and especially men as they try to come to terms with needs and impulses that can start a terrifying train of events. Sexual attraction is shown as a game that often turns sour, an experience that brings with it painful insights and releases uncertainty, panic, vanity and a constant need for reassurance. Thus a young couple on holiday start a game of pretence that threatens to destroy their relationship, two middle-aged men go in search of girls they don't really want, a young man renews contact with an older woman who feels humiliated by her ageing body, an elderly doctor uses his beautiful wife to increase his attraction and minister to his sexual vanity. In Laughable Loves, Milan Kundera shows himself, once again, as a master of fiction's most graceful illusions and surprises.

General

Imprint:	Faber and Faber
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	August 2000
Authors:	Milan Kundera
Dimensions:	197 x 126 x 22mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	287
Edition:	Main
ISBN-13:	978-0-571-20692-6
Categories:	Books
LSN:	0-571-20692-1
Barcode:	9780571206926

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