[In the following positive review, Chua surveys some of the themes in Laughable Loves.]

[Laughable Loves] is a decidedly provocative and worth-while volume of short stories; they challenge our imagination and exercise our intellect. These stories first appeared in their native Czechoslovakia in 1969, and American readers might have caught glimpses of them in American Poetry Review or Esquire. Here they are in a highly readable translation by Suzanne Rappaport, chaperoned by a substantial and sympathetic introduction from Philip Roth.

The title of the anthology (Smesne Lasky in Czech) is aptly descriptive. Kundera's laughs, however, are remote from Playboy's party ribaldry. Certainly his humor does stem from sexual foibles, and his stories do deal with bed manners in contemporary Czechoslovakia. However, sexuality for Kundera is as existentially important as it is for Mailer; but where Mailer's sexual heroes tend to be clad in angst, Kundera tricks his lovers up in an ironic wit reminiscent of Maupassant. Further, Kundera's erotic gamesmanship, rather like Benjamin Constant's, deals in themes of identity and illusion to which he adds some deft Pirandellesque touches; moreover his symbolism moves persistently towards social commentary. Such comparisons, however, are invidious. The quality of Kundera is nothing if not original.

The first story, "The Hitchhiking Game," shows us a rather conventional young couple who playfully take on pretended romantic roles. She becomes a hitchiker; he picks her up. As they improvise their commedia dell'arte, the roles begin to invade the reality of the actors (one recalls Kundera's connections with the Prague Film School); the unnamed man and woman discover unexpected erotic identities in themselves which build up to the moment of climax. When the woman wishes to end the game and recover her "real" identity, piteously crying "I am me, I am me," they find that reverting to their so-called natural and real selves necessitates an artificial and pre-planned effort—a kind of role playing.

Underlying this psychologically intricate episode, one senses an undercurrent of social allegory. Imagistically, the young man's life is a "road . . . drawn with immaculate precision." Although he drives a sports car, "the terrible thought of the straight road would overcome him." To play the hitchhiking game is to detour off this road mapped out for him by his society, and he finds a spontaneity at once irresistibly tempting and dangerously anomic.

But perhaps Kundera's most politically allegorical story is "The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire." The story is deceptively lightweight at first glance. Martin, its protagonist, is a happily married man who persists in chasing every skirt in sight. In the course of the story, his friend the narrator comes to perceive that Martin is a sort of harmless mythomaniac about his amours and realizes that Martin's pursuit of women is a necessity for his sense of self, an activity by which he gains an identity through participation in an archetypal endeavor. But this banal erotic comedy is laced with a rather grim political allegory. In his description of the sexual chase, the narrator uses an odd terminology. When they obtain a girl's phone and address, they call it a "registration." A date is a "contact," after which matters may proceed to the consummately desirable "arrest." The analogy between the sexual chase and the police state emerges. ("Alibi," "heretic," "apostate" are some of the other terms that develop this parallel.) And the implied critique of the police state is clear. Like Martin, the police state has to pursue some quarry to obtain a sense of identity; if there is no quarry, one must be invented to justify the pursuer's existence. Kundera's allegory points up the hollowness of a police state which must resort to inventing crimes and criminals to maintain its sense of potency. Many police states, like Martin's compulsive amours, are redundant and illusory. Martin is happily married; Czechoslovakia (or Chile) is capable of prosperity and populist government.

"Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead" describes the re-encounter of a 35-year-old man and a 50-year-old woman who had made love to each other fifteen years ago. Here Kundera touches on the theme of time with an irony reminiscent of Resnais; and after some painfully protracted foreplay, the lovemaking that eventuates savors of the unwholesome and the necrophilic. "Nobody Will Laugh" presents us with a Slavonic Lucky Jim and shows us that fancy and imaginativeness are impossible in Czech academia. (Depending on one's own experience, one may wish to conclude that Amis' Merrie England is less or more truthful a locale that Kundera's Czechoslovakia.) Only its irony and its remarkably humane point of view avert the tragic emotions and turn this story towards wry comedy.

"Symposium" parodies Plato's matter and method and introduces a Dr. Havel, the most Don Juanish of Kundera's lovers. Following upon that, "Dr. Havel After Ten Years" is a jeu d'esprit erected upon an aging Don Juan and poses the conundrum that sensuality is more of the mind than the flesh, that a Don Juan's legend will metamorphose his ugliness into beauties, his corpulence into comeliness.

The last story of the book, "Edward and God," is a complex and teasingly ambiguous tale about a young atheist teacher who pretends to be religious to gain his girl friend's favors. His public display of Christianity, however, gets him into trouble with his female superintendent. As a tactic of self-preservation, Edward has to continue to play the role of a Christian on the brink of apostasy. He is then compelled to seduce his repulsive superintendent and only manages it when her incantation of the Lord's Prayer manages to overcome an untimely flaccidity on his part. As we may expect, Kundera ends his story on an enigma (and an epiphany) in which a thoroughly defeated and steadfastly infidel Edward oddly does find God and transforms his sorrow into joy.

In sum, these seven stories are uncommonly good. Characterization is solid, psychology subtle, situations and plots as simple or complex as the desired effect requires. Admittedly, Kundera's canvas is not large. His protagonists are almost exclusively drawn from a sensuous layer of intelligentsia, a white-collar fringe of socialist society. They are philandering bureaucrats, perky academics, bibulous doctors, jobless teachers. They share the common trait of imaginativeness in their approach to eros. They love in an all-too-familiar world of modern monolithic, where spontaneity and originality are impermissible, and where creativity can only flourish by subterfuge. No wonder, then, that Kundera has attracted significant notice in France where his novel, Life is Elsewhere, won the Prix de Medicis and where both Sartre and Aragon may praise him.