The Story Archive

Laughable Loves

Milan Kundera · 1969 CE · Short Story · Czech · Contemporary

Seven stories about people who try on a role for amusement and find it will not come off: a couple on holiday playing at hitchhiker and stranger, a young teacher feigning belief in God to keep his post and his girl, a woman visiting a husband's grave whose lease has expired. Erotic games are the mechanism and self-deception the subject. Kundera wrote them over ten years either side of 1960 and said they were where he first found his own voice.

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