Stuck in a Book

I was quite a way into my choice for 1969 on A Century of Books – Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall – when I decided I’d had enough. I’m sure I’ll go back and finish it and, in another mood, might even enjoy it. Drabble is a brilliant writer. But I was finding the details of a new mother’s affair with her cousin’s husband very, very tedious. I simply didn’t care.

And so it is perhaps surprising that I turned, instead, to Kundera’s short story collection Laughable Loves, translated from Czech by Suzanna Rappaport. After all, if I was finding one person’s granular exploration of an affair very uninteresting, what was I hoping to find in a book that – in my edition at least – was described as ‘seven short stories of sexual comedy’?

Well, if I picked up this book blind, it would have gone right back on the shelf. Nothing sounds less up my street than ‘stories of sexual comedy’. But luckily this isn’t my first rodeo with Kundera, and I know that he’s an absolutely brilliant writer – and, indeed, this is a pretty inaccurate description of what we’ll find inside.

I think the stories in Laughable Loves are published in different orders depending on your edition, but mine starts with a fascinating one called ‘The Hitchhiking Game’. A young couple are on a road trip together and have just stopped for petrol when they slide by silent agreement into their hitchhiking game. He pretends to be a stranger; she pretends to be a hitchhiker. There is an eroticism to it, though it isn’t just foreplay. This is a way for them to find an exciting freedom in their personalities, able to say things they wouldn’t normally, but with the solid bedrock of a stable relationship beneath it. Only, in this story, the bedrock is starting to shift.

“I wouldn’t have to think too hard about what to do with such a beautiful woman,” said the young man gallantly, and at this moment he was once again speaking far more to his own girl than to the figure of the hitchhiker.

But this flattering sentence made the girl feel as if she had caught him at something, as if she had wheedled a confession out of him with a fraudulent trick. She felt toward him a brief flash of intense hatred and said: “Aren’t you rather too sure of yourself?”

The couple bob and weave between their parallel personalities – the real and the costume – with each sentence in danger of commenting on the wrong one. It’s a beautifully crafted story, growing steadily darker, and reminded me a lot (in theme and sensibility) of Harold Pinter’s play ‘The Lover’ (1962).

If ‘The Hitchhiking Game’ is fraught and tense, then the next story is elegiac – from the title ‘Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead’ onwards. The title comes from a middle-aged, unnamed woman visiting the grave of her (rather older) husband – only to find that somebody else is now buried there.

Upset, she went to the cemetery administration. They told her that upon expiration of leases, graves were canceled. She reproached them for not having advised her that she should renew the lease, and they replied that there was little room in the cemetery and that the old dead ought to make room for the young dead. This exasperated her and she told them, holding back her tears, that they knew absolutely nothing of humaneness or respect for man. But she soon understood that the conversation was useless. Just as she could not have prevented her husband’s death, so also was she defenseless against his second death, this death of an old dead man, which no longer permitted him to exist even as a dead man.

While in this old town, she meets a young man (also unnamed) who was infatuated with her in the past. He is 15 years younger than her – about the age she was, when he last saw her – and they quickly go from reminiscences to romance. Then the story becomes about her inner conflict: should she sleep with this younger, attractive man, or would it shatter his remembrance of her beauty which would, in turn, shatter her own self-image?

Yes, there was no doubt about it: if he got her to make love, it would end in disgust—and this disgust would then tarnish not only the present moment, but also the image of the woman of long ago, an image he cherished like a jewel in his memory.

It is a curious will-they-won’t-they, with rather more psychological acuity than that premise would usually be expected to hold. Kundera was only 40 when this book was published, and of course not a woman, but it seems to me (admittedly also about 40 and not a woman) a very insightful portrayal of the many emotions that face a woman in this woman’s position.

Ok, you’re thinking, I’m beginning to see why ‘sexual comedy’ was thrown about as a term. And, yes, quite a few of the stories have some sort of sexual impetus in them – but my favourite of the book doesn’t really. ‘Nobody Will Laugh’ is one of those things-spiral-out-of-hand stories. Klima, the narrator, is a professor who gets a letter from Zaturetsky, asking him to write a review letter of his scholarship, for a journal. The amateur scholar is laughably bad, and Klima enjoys mocking the research with his girlfriend, but wants to avoid conflict and so sends a vague letter implying (but not promising) that he’ll write a review at some point.

Zaturetsky is determined, though. He starts turning up at Klima’s office, and Klima’s long-suffering secretary makes up excuses for his absence. Eventually Zaturetsky is turning up at Klima’s home, and the further lies Klima makes up to avoid writing the review end up derailing his job, his relationship, and his standing in the notoriously censorious society. It’s a brilliant and believable exploration of a lie getting out of hand that has a through-line to Kundera’s first novel about a joke getting out of hand (The Joke), albeit that was very dark and ‘Nobody Will Laugh’ is the funniest story in this collection.

I’ve written at length about the first three stories because they are the strongest in the collection. Indeed, I was anticipating Laughable Loves being a late entry on my Best Reads of 2024 list – but sadly the collection is a bit uneven. The Symposium is particularly shapeless – about various medical staff and their would-be exploits – and others lack the excellent grasp of pace and structure that mark out the brilliance of the first three. Thankfully, Laughable Loves ends on a stronger story – ‘Edward and God’ – about a man who pretends to believe in God to appease his girlfriend. Like ‘Nobody Will Laugh’, it’s a lie that begins to get out of control, and a reminder of how much Communist Eastern Europe persecuted Christians at the time – though it is also a lie that begins to become psychologically more and more important in Edwards’s life, while still resisting the pat ending of a genuine conversion.

It’s always a joy to go back to a Kundera book. I’ve read eight now, somehow without including his most famous, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This collection isn’t as postmodern and stylistically daring as he can be, but it is a reminder of his searing understanding of human relationships – both their tragedy and their comedy, often intertwined.

I can see why Penguin called these stories of sexual comedy, and that is an area that fascinates Kundera – but I think anybody buying the book on that premise will be disappointed, and it may well deter those who’ll find in Kundera far more nuance, psychological insight, and slanted beauty than those words suggest. (This edition has an intro by Philip Roth, which I have absolutely no interest in reading.)