SOURCE: "Amid Chaos, the Survival of Form: Laughable Loves," in Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs, University of South Carolina Press, 1993, pp. 162-90.

Misurella is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he suggests that Laughable Loves revolves "on the theme of our helplessness before external events and the inadequacy of language as a tool in controlling or understanding them"

[An] interest in ironic play, polyphony, and thematic variation as the basis of his concept of the novel's form has led Kundera to regard Laughable Loves as a novel in seven parts, although it began as a collection of ten separate stories published in three separate volumes in Czech. In The Art of the Novel, while discussing how frequently he resorts to seven-part structures in his novels, he says he eliminated three of the original ten Laughable Loves stories and "the whole thing became very...