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Title: Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera ISBN: 0060997036 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: May, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.47
Rating: 5
Summary: A brilliant insight into the male mindset in times of love
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Engulfing tale of human passions
Comment: 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: 5
Summary: ¿Love is a Many-Kundera¿ed Thing¿
Comment: "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.
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Title: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera ISBN: 0060932147 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Immortality by Milan Kundera ISBN: 0060932384 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: November, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The JOKE by Milan Kundera ISBN: 006099505X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: January, 1994 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Unbearable Lightness of Being : A Novel by Milan Kundera ISBN: 0060932139 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Life Is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher ISBN: 0060997028 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: August, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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