Směšné lásky = Laughable Loves, Milan KunderaLaughable Loves is a collection of seven short stories written by Milan Kundera in which he presents his characteristic savage humour by mixing the extremes of tragedy with comic situations in relationships. Stories: Nobody Will Laugh; The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire; The Hitchhiking Game; Symposium; Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead; Dr. Havel After Twenty Years; Eduard and God.عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «عشقهای خنده دار»؛ «دون ژوان»؛

“We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.”One of Kundera's earlier works, Laughable Loves is a collection of short stories that illustrate familiar themes of sexual politics and seduction using his trademark dark humor. Each story is marked with a stroke of tragic nuance from the...

This collection of seven artful stories which were rich in philosophising, eroticism, cynicism and humour, agin shows Kundera in top form. Maybe not one his best, but this was still such fun to read. Generally speaking, these stories mostly deal with the consolation of middle-class Central European men, who, fueled by desire and sometimes despair, are out to impress each other by seducing women, both the adoring young, and the lustful older, and what's different here compared to some of his othe...

Kundera is a beautiful writer but that is my only positive comment on the matter. This man is so far beyond sexist, there is no word for it. HIs depictions of women are not necessarily filled with sexist language - they are just totally devoid of respect. Kundera seems incapable of seeing women as anything other than sex objects. Every story, every female character, and every male character revolve around the same abusive sex game of cat-and-mouse. It gets old.

how can somebody be so clever to create stories from things we don't think would deserve to be a story!

Short stories from Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. These stories are fiction, of course, with the subject matter typically dealing with romance, sex, and relationships. It's an easy, enjoyable read, but there's a genius to it, in that the stories contain so many lessons, that if they weren't fictionalized, the book could appropriately be labeled self-help, philosophy, or psychology. (Most of the stories contain some combination of the three.) In this sense, Kundera re...

I like Kundra because he doesn’t imprison me in a fastened frame of a classic narration. Reading Kundra seems as if you meet an old friend after ages in a cafe shop, and while she/he relates her / his life story, you zip your coffee, listen to the cafe music, hear some chats and laughs at nabouring tables, look at the peddlers at side walk, or a passing tramvay, … as life is flowing around, …. کوندرا را به این دلیل بسیار دوست دارم که مرا در چهارچوب بسته ی یک روایت زندانی نمی کند. خواندن کونرا مث...

well, though i'm currently not quite winning at the game of love, it's some consolation to know that the rest of the human race is losing right along with me. and isn't that just hilarious??

I dunno. I remembered liking this more, but it is a tell-tale sign when I can't remember anything else about a book—as the really good'uns sear themselves into your poetic memory, don't they, so that you have to carry them with you, like it or lump it, through time (it does get kinda heavy, then, don't it, reelin' in the years). But with this one? No, nothing, as re-reading each story was like an entirely new encounter. And an encounter, not a love story—and yes, Kundera is one of my top faves,

“Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.” ― Milan Kundera, Laughable LovesLaughable Loves contains seven of Milan Kundera's short stories about love, absurdity, jokes, and the consequences of jokes. Some of the stories were almost painful to read, but all were well-crafted and had me questioning several assumptions about pleasure and experience. After reading several Kundera it is hard, however, to not take notice of his hostility toward women. It isn't jus...

Little white lies turn into existential crises, and hefty debates arise between knowledge and truth: It's Kundera. As one of his earlier works, Laughable Loves is more simple and honest than others that I've read, and therefore extremely subtle its nuances. It's not as beautiful as his later writing, but there's beauty in that.Kundera is a master at pointing out the flaws in intimate relationships that nobody ever cares to mention: the love of impossible imperfections, the desire to cheat (and t...

I never expected that this book by Kundera would be so captivating, that it almost transfixed me in one place for one whole night and left me laughing. Human relationships, its intricacy and playfulness along with the subsisting absurdity which almost always creeps in, is excellently portrayed by Kundera. There is a doctor who rejects the ostensible proposal of a beautiful nurse to sleep with him although he almost makes out with uglier and older women than her; a young doctor who perfectly cook...

Laughable Loves is one of Kundera's earlier works, published in 1969, and like many of Kundera's novels (this one is a collection of seven short stories), love, relationships and sex are masterfully dissected. Sexual attraction is a major theme in this collection - we see men and women weave their way through complex erotic games, reaching out for success; for maturity; for a rekindling of youth; for social status; for love...I found the first story weak but the quality picked up thereafter. I w...

Laughable Loves is a fabulous collection of short stories that walks the fine line between tragic and funny. I do like Kundera's sense of humour. At times cheeky, at times dark, Kundera does humour in his way. Some of this stories are more explicit venturing slightly into the terrain of erotica, while others are more philosophical and human. Some of them analyze the society and reference politics, while others are just silly and fun. The characters are pretty well developed for the story form an...

so boring - Kundera is trying to be comedically self-aware and philosophically profound but is simply just a misogynist trying to pass off woman-hating blabbering as a deep and true portrait of the inner male psyche. maybe this is a true portrait of his inner psyche? which makes me like it even less. by the end, i thought i would die if i had to read one more sentence about the game of chasing women and getting them into bed or the importance of an attractive female body. We seriously don’t need...

"Life is often brutal and humiliating; it is often blasphemous, funny, irritating."At least not meeting a book in the wrong time is as equally important as not to meet a person in the wrong time : )

|| We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.||Written in a very humoristic and savage manner all the stories contain in it bear in itself a rather peculiar or paradoxical treatment.Whereas i have observed earlier that Milan kundera's writing reflects mostly upon sexual and erotic

Laughable Loves is a collection of seven short stories written between 1958 and 1968 in Bohemia (a region in present-day Czech Republic), and takes on a dark humor approach to love, relationship, and the actions people make that oftentimes result to tragically comic consequences.(For a summary of each story, click this link from Wikipedia.)I would say Milan Kundera is a prolific writer. He writes descriptively about his characters’ thought process and complex mind-game narratives, as evident in

My cover has a naked blue chick on the front.So, I actually finished this book about two days ago. I never came to write a review. There's no good reason for my delay. I had time to sit and reflect; I had time to sit and write, but I sort of just shut down about the whole thing.Kundera managed to leave me a little cold here. Maybe it's the weather, all the snow and wind and stuff, all of which I normally love. Our dog likes to roll around on her back in the snow. I like that too. This stuff is l...

Have often read of Kundera’s attitudes to women and how it is harsh. For some reason I did not find this trait in these interesting set of short stories. Each of them speak of different types of relationships in different situations. The stories are well crafted with identified themes that are brought to life with some characters who re appear from time to time. I am looking forward to reading his other works.

Never managed to finish this book, as I found it uninspiring, boring, and littered with the sort of casual misogyny that's so common amongst male "intellectuals." Maybe I'll return to it later, but as of now it seems to drastically pale when compared to The Lightness of Being.

ExperienceCan we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it hasEccentricityI lived like an eccentric who thinks that he lives unobserved behind a wallThe wall is made of transparent glassJokesThese days there's no time for jokes; these days everything is seriousKlaraI understood unmistakably that it wasn't within my power to remove the senseless gravity from the whole affair, and that I could dispose of it in only the one way: to blur the traces, to lure them aw...

Kundera writes with an elastic quality that moves the work like a snapping waistband. I appreciate quite heartily the oddity of structure in “Symposium” and how it becomes successful at capturing a reader in spite of/because of this. Plus, with sentences as sublime as “Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.” Or this: “However much h...

What a thoughtful collection of stories! This book had been lying on my shelf since last year but I always kept ignoring it until lack of unread books on my shelf forced me to pick this one. Like the usual Kundera-esque style, these stories embody play of erotics, desire for the unattainable, and grief of the lost souls. The anthology opens with a lustful game of a couple who play roles of hitchhikers as they seduce each other and reveal to each other the other self that lays concealed under the...

I bought this book near Colaba from a roadside hawker. It was an impulsive buy I just loved the cover art 'A nude woman covering herself with her hands'."How interesting is that picture!" I thought and immediately bought it.Surprise!! the stories where are also of great quality and marked a delightful read. Previously my proxy-experience with Kundera's writing was the movie adaptation of "The unbearable lightness of being" (Which I must say does not have the book's playfulness) . But this partic...

This book is definitely a quick read yet very thought-provoking. It sort of makes you confront things you might otherwise think about, as well. He very much takes something, a topic, and expands on it very eloquently. What he does with the topics in the book really makes it a real emotional experience. If you have read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, like me, or any other book by Milan Kundera you really have to read this one.Milan Kundera is fairly good at writing about emotional entanglemen...

a brilliant blend of philosophy, humor and irony in simple language. Wonderful how Kundera portrays the pathos and tragedies of life through poignant sarcasm that makes one sigh yet with a smile of acknowledgement.

"The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people"

3.5 stars. An interesting, whimsical collection of seven short stories about sex and love. Sexual attraction that causes uncertainty and a need for reassurance is a constant theme. In ‘The Hitchhiking Game’ a young couple pretend to have only recently met and find their game becomes complicated. In ‘The Golden Apple of Desire’, two middle aged men go out of their way to pick up young women they don’t really want! In ‘Dr, Havel After Ten Years’, an elderly doctor married to a beautiful famous act...

Nobody Will Laugh - 5 starsThe Hitchhiking Game - 3.5 starsThe Golden Apple of Desire - 2 StarsSymposium - 1.5 StarsLet the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead - 2 StarsDr. Havel After Twenty Years - 2 StarsEduard and God - 3 Stars