SOURCE: "Laughable Loves; or, The Impossible Don Juan," in Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera, Grove Weidenfeld, 1990, pp. 52-73.

In the following essay, Banerjee contrasts Kundera's portrayal of the Don Juan myth with traditional versions.

Laughable Loves was the first of Milan Kundera's works to reach American readers. It was published in New York in 1974, with an introduction by Philip Roth, while its author was still living in Czechoslovakia. But all seven stories that make up the volume were written much earlier, between 1959 and 1969, during that marvelous decade of Czech culture which was also a time of great artistic ferment for Kundera. Originally, the title Směšné lásky (Laughable Loves) linked a series of ten short stories issued in three separate "notebooks," the last of which saw print in 1969, during the final gasp of Czech literary freedom. In the definitive form achieved after several authorial interventions...