Long Live Laugh: Laughable Loves of
Milan Kundera- Book review
Seriously, sometimes the human universe
will be filled with jokes, when people, especially lovers, who wouldn't make out
what they really wanted to have, achieve in the games of eternal desire. What
they thought as they needed is simply a plethora of unseen and hence unknown.
After having rushed for gaining a vulnerable love, suddenly the lovers
would reach a summit of desperation, when shyness was history, the present is a plain of unfamiliarity where
the man would lose the lover, for a woman, whom he craves to yield. Milan Kundera's
Laughable Loves unleashed the real paradoxes of (manly) wishes.
The women, absolutely real,
escape the imagination on the one side and occupy the province of imagination
on the other, playing hide and seek and finally, dwelled on the whimsical
frames of the minds, leave the space, surmising the weary the lessons of
incredible failure. Kundera showed young and old libertines, who, with or
without satiety, end up in the most farcical aspect of opportunities.
The book is a humorous take on human tragedies; the sublime
is no sublime for a vision Kundera exposed enormously through quotable threads:
"When a man is contented, he gladly turns down an opportunity that presents
itself, so as to be reassured about his blissful satiety", "Her
ugliness relieved him of the shyness to which feminine beauty always reduced
him" and "in order to prove her religious faith, she had to devote
her entire attention... God Antifornicator" are a few in the many.
Out of the seven stories mixing desire and despair, in "The
Hitchhiking Game" and "Edward and God'', the female characters wretchedly
live as the helpless spectators along with their erotic male counterparts without
tasting the success to illustrate and
substantiate themselves for each others' needs. While "The Golden
Apple of Eternal Desire" is a virtual tour de farce guided by a Martin
,"Symposium" is the conspicuous depiction of Elisabeth's eroticism,
her imaginary striptease and Dr. Havel's reprimand and a platonic love at the
backstage followed by the theories of individual characters on Elisabeth.”The
old dead make the room for the young dead" bluntly articulates the layers
of guilt and yearning and unfolds the strange intricacies of fulfilment and
gratification beyond idealism as a character remarks," you have erected a
monument to me within your memory. We cannot allow it to be
destroyed."
"Nobody will
laugh" reveals how an excuse is taken as promise by telling the tale of an
art history lecturer and Mr. Zaturecky who desperately runs after the lecturer
who vaguely submitted to the commitment of reviewing the article of the former
that he believed as nothing more than crap. The events turned to a surprising
menace when the lecturer raised an allegation that the scholar is a womanizer,
unnecessarily involving his lover and the wife of the scholar into his plot of
procrastination. "Dr. Havel after Twenty years" presented a man
who couldn't agree with the gradual invisibility and absence of attention, the
contributions of the time's travel that he substituted with the popularity of
his wife, a beautiful actress.
Kundera's subjects are
indeed men of unrelenting lust, and women are the premises of the stories of
men. Of course, his women too are far from the innocent fragile manifestation
of cupid, sometimes fantastic monuments of human wishes and sometimes
flirtatious, shameless, intolerable, fearsome, envious and impulsive.
Laughable loves is sharp-witted, if you don't read
it like "optimism is the opium of the people, a healthy atmosphere stinks
of stupidity. Long live.....".
Aswathi.M.P.
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