SOURCE: "Milan Kundera's Use of Sexuality," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. XXVI, No. 3, Spring, 1985, pp. 131-40.

In the following essay, Sturdivant assesses Kundera's use of sexual intercourse in his fiction to portray "the utter meaninglessness of the human condition."

In examining the work of Czechoslavakian author Milan Kundera, critic Philip Roth observes that "almost all [Kundera's] novels, in fact all the individual parts of his latest book, find their dénouement in great scenes of coitus" (afterword, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 236). Indeed, in Kundera's most recent effort, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the novelist follows a pattern earlier established in his highly acclaimed novel The Joke and his collection of short stories Laughable Loves by depicting sexuality as "the focus where all the themes of the story converge and where its deepest secrets are located" (afterword, 236). Kundera views sexuality and eroticism as "the...