Laughable Loves

Seven stories, all taking place in a Czechoslovakia of the 1960s — a society in which the Stalinist terror has receded but its distortions remain, in which people have learned to navigate the gap between public performance and private reality with a mixture of weariness, ingenuity, and erotic energy. The men and women in these stories are funny, melancholy, self-deceiving, and entirely recognisable — caught in the particular kind of inauthenticity that political systems impose on private life.

Kundera’s early short fiction — collected in Laughable Loves — is the work in which his characteristic voice first becomes fully itself: the combination of philosophical intelligence, erotic comedy, and Central European melancholy that would make him one of the most widely read European writers of the twentieth century. These stories are lighter than his novels but no less precise.

The ideal introduction to Kundera — and a genuine pleasure in their own right. Published by Faber & Faber.