Rating: 
Summary: Not Laughter and Forgetting...
Review: "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. 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!
Rating:
Summary: ?Love is a Many-Kundera?ed Thing?
Review: "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.
Rating:
Summary: Eros & Psyche
Review: "The stores are bound with politics, and even when politics is never mentioned, as in "The Hitchhiking Game," it enters the story as a kind of fatigue: why else would this pair be behaving like this if it weren't for the fact that their famished imaginations are the result of political frustration?" Phillip Roth Roth misses the point. I read this book in spring '88 and discovered inadvertently that I had played a mild, beginning version of 'the hitchhiking game' with my German girlfriend in 11/87 on our last night together before she returned home from the US. We, by our challenging and persistent playing against each other, generated an instability that nearly led to an agreed upon split-up. Fortunately, one of us regained control and stopped the game before it was too late (it lasted only minutes in this case).This was a pure psychologic instability having nothing whatsoever to do with politics or eastern mentalities. Kundera has described something 'universal' in the hitchhiking game.
Rating: 
Summary: A disappointment
Review: After reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I was determined to read as many Kundera works as possible. The short stories in Laughable Loves are nowhere near the genius or perfection of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Rating:
Summary: Engulfing tale of human passions
Review: 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."
Rating:
Summary: Sexual Conquest
Review: I can see why Kundera is the focus of so much controversy and at times his more profound issues are not given their due. In "Laughable Loves" as in several of Kundera's other novels, for many of the young male characters, love comes primarily in the form of sexual conquest, and promises of adventure, a rare chance to experience the uncommon and feel some sense of empowerment. Granted that there is this element, the experience of youthful exuberance, it is this and much more. It seems as though the comical characters who push the hardest for love are the most disappointed and indeed laughable - so, is it advocacy or parody? This a chance to poke fun at ourselves. A series of short stories, Kundera plays in the field of make believe and possibility, and shows us another side of the human condition. Miguel Llora
Rating: 
Summary: Light read but not light
Review: I say the entire book is a light read because it is composed of several short stories, of which 1 or 2 could be read in one seating. Light, because at a glance, the tales seemed shallow & the stories dealt on eroticism. But despite the humor, the comicness & the absurdity in which each character is cloaked in, one will realize that the author was leading the readers to a man's real state of mind --- his obsession with sex & self worth, self satisfaction & contentment, all intertwined. Yes, man's ego - at his best or worst - which can then lead to either his downfall or redemption. At a glance, this may be mistaken by the feminist groups to be glorifying men's sexual conquests --- at the expense of the hapless female characters. But at a closer look, one would also recognize the author's equal ability to draw out truthfully a woman's bing & state of mind through his excellent narration. Of the 7 short stories, I found 3 very relevant & touching. Yes, the humor & the light-mannered narration were still present but they reeked too much of reality --- too close for comfort. If I were to rate my choices in order, I would rank "The Hitchiker's Game" as #1, "Edward & God" as #2 & "Let the Old Dead make froom for the Young Dead" as #3. In an industry where commercialism (what with all these movie tie-ins)& plot predictability, Milan Kundea & his books are a welcome change. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has been searching for something new, something different, soemthing meaningful & something intellectual.
Rating:
Summary: a playful and ironic read
Review: Kundera puts some of his favorite themes to work in a playful way, as suggested by the title. Throughout the seven short stories in Laughable Loves Kundera highlights the role that mutual misunderstandings play in the creation of seemingly profound, heroic, self-congratulatory experiences, especially where love is concerned. Several tales are heavily ironic: wonderful contradictions emerge when people who cannot take themselves seriously try desperately hard to do so in order to please the straightfaced world in which they find themselves stuck. Similarly, the plasticity of personality, the wispy, fleeting character of existence and the partnership between sadism and sexual desire permeate his plots. Kundera blurs the distinction between charade and authenticity creating the suspicion that human identities may be centerless webs of charades - yet this lack of depth need not be bleak or tragic: it can be liberating and beautiful. These stories are a joy to read if you're in the mood for ambiguous endings and ironic humor. Although they lack the gravity of his full-length novels I think the short stories in Laughable Loves succeed: irony, not sublimity, is the goal. I gave it four stars because it didn't grip me the way some of Kundera's stuff has in the past while at the same time it was certainly fun (and often psychologically insightful) reading.
Rating:
Summary: a playful and ironic read
Review: Kundera puts some of his favorite themes to work in a playful way, as suggested by the title. Throughout the seven short stories in Laughable Loves Kundera highlights the role that mutual misunderstandings play in the creation of seemingly profound, heroic, self-congratulatory experiences, especially where love is concerned. Several tales are heavily ironic: wonderful contradictions emerge when people who cannot take themselves seriously try desperately hard to do so in order to please the straightfaced world in which they find themselves stuck. Similarly, the plasticity of personality, the wispy, fleeting character of existence and the partnership between sadism and sexual desire permeate his plots. Kundera blurs the distinction between charade and authenticity creating the suspicion that human identities may be centerless webs of charades - yet this lack of depth need not be bleak or tragic: it can be liberating and beautiful. These stories are a joy to read if you're in the mood for ambiguous endings and ironic humor. Although they lack the gravity of his full-length novels I think the short stories in Laughable Loves succeed: irony, not sublimity, is the goal. I gave it four stars because it didn't grip me the way some of Kundera's stuff has in the past while at the same time it was certainly fun (and often psychologically insightful) reading.
Rating:
Summary: WISTFUL ILLUSIONS, DELECTABLE ROMANCE..
Review: 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.
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