Laughable Loves [Paperback]

Milan Kundera is one of the few authors in the world who can capture the painful transparency of desire with a few lines. In his collection of short stories, 'Laughable Loves', he uses his sparse but intricate prose to devastating effect, exposing the complex structures men build on top of their ultimately mundane fantasies and erotic desires. The author does not employ intricate and bemusing syntax; his straightforward, teasing style of writing illustrates his astute perceptiveness when unravelling the myths of love. This book is a gem of a starter course- rather than leaving the reader bloated and immobile by unnecessary stodge, this book can make us appreciate the idea of thoughtful reflection being an ingredient in the creation of self-explaining simplicity, leaving us with a myriad of sensations to savour.

This is a collection of short stories about love particularly from the male perspective. Each looks at contrasting different aspects of love with unnerving verisimilitude. Kundera's observation of human behaviour is startingly accurate as he deftly unravels the male psyche; the female characters are no more idly portrayed either. The prose is lucid, elegant and concise, as is the situational complicity of each plot. This book shows how men are consumed by, and can be crippled by love (in a way that many women think impossible) and how this can tenuously result in them acting as they do - often as irreverent, cold-hearted bastards. Women, read this to understand your hubby/men in general; men, read this to know that you are not alone.

If only Milan Kundera's short story collection Laughable Loves had been simply an enjoyable read... Several other adjectives come to mind: arresting, compelling, strange, detached, sometimes disappointing. None of these get to the core of the work, a core that, on finishing the book, might seem more elusive than at any time during the progress of the text.

In Laughable Loves we are presented with characters that often seem to behave like cut-outs being pushed across a stage whose set is alien to them. They often seem only partially engaged with their own lives, even lost in their surroundings, no matter how familiar they are claimed to be. They are apparently controlled by others, perhaps by forces not only beyond their control, but also beyond their influence, even beyond their experience.

On the surface, however, this is not a book about totalitarianism or overt control. There are hardly any overtly political themes or references. As a background, as might be expected, this seems to be taken as given. There are references to a faceless system here and there, but this in no Kafka-esque construction of an all-embracing and constraining reality. In Laughable Loves Milan Kundera seems to imprison people primarily within the demands of their own humanity. They seem to be enslaved by their own, inevitable, controllable but not controlled urges. This is fundamental behaviour that they think they can control, but the fact that they cannot confirms that it controls them.

And, of course, the urge of sex, the reality of sex, the realisation of sex, the promise of sex, the deferment of sex, the doing of sex, all of these vie for the forefront of consciousness, their common factor apparently both the motive and the end of all intent. We may play with gods, careers, influence or power, but our ultimate and single-minded motive is the achievement of the momentary majesty of sexual communion.

In his film, Casanova may have been likened to an erectile clockwork toy, pre-ordained by virtue of inevitable, hard-wired mechanism to perform whenever wound up. And in this book, Kundera presents people who mimic such automata, except that occasionally a spring gives, or a cog slips. "Ah, ladies and gentlemen," he writes, "a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anyone or anything seriously." But almost no-one in these stories is eventually serious about anything, except the sex drive that controls them and whose realisation so often results in no more than sensations of the ephemeral. Immediately it is the next time that is yearned. They are thus all sad, quite absurdly sad, even as the invisible hand that manipulates their cut-out play in an alien theatre makes them move and perform. Even sadder is the human cut-out who doesn't even believe that such a controlling hand might exist.