Doubt isn’t only something that happens to you. It is something you bring on or in yourself as well. Doubt can sometimes become a habit, a needless question asked at every turn, about everything without caring or knowing the consequences that might ensue. But once you allow it in, it creeps its way in and start eating your belief, understanding, and peace from the inside. Soon enough, the insides will have become corrosive, and the doubt to be found at every fracture.
Whether it is a skepticism about one’s religious beliefs, or doubting your partner about their loyalty, or requestioning oneself about one’s favorite author, which is the case here, doubt is always certain to disrupt even the most solid of reasons and arguments. It doesn’t have its logic, but has a dark force about it. It feels like you know the results without even going through with the experiment. But you will go any length to prove that which you think you already know. It is a stubbornness, a stubbornness to prove right only that which you merely doubted.
At the end of ‘Kreutzer Sonata’, the movie, the husband of the piano player kills his wife, believing in his doubts that she was having an affair with the younger violin player. Yet it is only after having killed her in his furious passion, that he at once comes to his senses and realizes that he has done. Doubt leaves behind wreckages that are sometimes too hard to bear out, even if you spend your whole life reliving them. An eternal hell, if you will.
Ever since my enthusiastic proclaim at having found Kundera to be my only favorite author of all, I’ve started to take it seriously. However, everywhere I look, I don’t find any echoes of my celebration about the greatness of Kundera and why he should be read, except on his books where every critic is all praise for him. A couple of happenstances, reading an article about how Kundera was arrogantly wrong about Dostoyevsky, and one the my trusted booktubers taking his name in a dismissive manner, and now I’m dubious if I was right in my celebrations, and if Kundera is truly that significant.
His collection of short stories, Laughable Loves, did but reinforce my beginning-to-crumble beliefs that Kundera only fashions himself to be a great insight-er but behind his psychological peeks and intoxicating sentences, he is all too shallow and self-involved.
All stories involve men chasing women, with Kundera commentary on it about what’s really going on: a critic gets into trouble after false-accusing an author of a paper of sexually harassing his girlfriend, only because he was too sensitive to say no to him; two friends live on chasing women, but once in a village to spend an evening with the lady-nurse, they both get abandoned by every girl they encountered there; a couple plays a hitchhiking game, where the girlfriend pretends to be a prostitute asking for a lift from her boyfriend who rides a sports car, but the game become a reality; four medical personnel debate about the attempted suicide of a lady-nurse, whom none of them wanted to sleep with, called Symposium; we meet one of the doctors from Symposium in the next short-story, and now he teaches a young editor how to know which woman to like, and the editor manages to sleep with the suicide-lady-nurse who also looks like a horse; the story follows a teacher who falls in love with a pious girl and himself starts going to church in order to finally sleep with her, but the journey he takes not only changes him but unveils the superficial piety of those around him.
I was terribly unimpressed going the first couple of stories
into this book, but only when I adjusted myself to the ‘deceiving simplicity’,
Kundera’s trademark, of the stories and started to look into them, did I begin
to arrive on the nuances found therein. In all these stories, Kundera has an
unapologetic presence, guiding, or rather, dictating the reader about the
insights to be gathered from the otherwise stupefying stories. There’s a
lightness about this book, almost comedic, but the arguments Kundera puts
forward give this book its intellectual allure, and it’s fascinating.
Ratings: 4/5 **** September
25, 2022_