Laughable Loves
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Laughable Loves
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Narrated by:
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Richmond Hoxie
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By:
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Milan Kundera
About this listen
Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road - only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on station platforms for the same lover, a middle-aged Don Juan who has gone home to his wife. Games, fantasies, and schemes abound in all the stories, while different characters react in varying ways to the sudden release of erotic impulses.
©1999 Milan Kundera (P)2012 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,199
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,915
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,922
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
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4 out of 5 stars
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Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 220
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 179
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Story4 out of 5 stars 179
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A well-lubricated orgy of ideas
- By Darwin8u on 04-26-14
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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Immortality
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 156
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 129
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 129
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Cerebral Crosswinds in Parisian fields
- By W Perry Hall on 01-13-14
By: Milan Kundera
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The Joke
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 130
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 112
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 112
All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Adder Sowing Thorns in the Garden of the Soul
- By W Perry Hall on 02-28-17
By: Milan Kundera
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Life Is Elsewhere
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 30
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 24
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Story4 out of 5 stars 24
The author initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent ("innocence with its bloody smile!"), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He's no creep, he's Rimbaud.
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3 out of 5 stars
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eh
- By Amazon Customer on 02-18-25
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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Farewell Waltz
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 26
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 23
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Story4 out of 5 stars 24
In this dark farce of a novel, set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American (at once saint and Don Juan); a popular trumpeter and his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife; an disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward. Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy.
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2 out of 5 stars
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didn't agree well.
- By Davygamm on 09-26-21
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,199
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,915
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,922
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 220
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 179
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 179
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
A well-lubricated orgy of ideas
- By Darwin8u on 04-26-14
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
Immortality
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 156
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 129
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 129
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Cerebral Crosswinds in Parisian fields
- By W Perry Hall on 01-13-14
By: Milan Kundera
-
The Joke
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 130
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 112
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 112
All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Adder Sowing Thorns in the Garden of the Soul
- By W Perry Hall on 02-28-17
By: Milan Kundera
-
Life Is Elsewhere
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 30
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 24
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 24
The author initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent ("innocence with its bloody smile!"), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He's no creep, he's Rimbaud.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
eh
- By Amazon Customer on 02-18-25
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
Farewell Waltz
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 26
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 23
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 24
In this dark farce of a novel, set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American (at once saint and Don Juan); a popular trumpeter and his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife; an disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward. Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy.
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2 out of 5 stars
-
didn't agree well.
- By Davygamm on 09-26-21
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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Ignorance
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 28
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Story4 out of 5 stars 28
Irena and Josef meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence "their memories no longer match."
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
Slowness
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 3 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 40
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 39
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Story4 out of 5 stars 39
Disconcerted and enchanted, the listener follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than 200 years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show .
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5 out of 5 stars
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Well done
- By Liam SR on 05-25-19
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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Encounter
- Essays
- By: Milan Kundera
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 18
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 14
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 14
Milan Kundera's brilliant new collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and ideas that characterizes his bestselling novels, the internationally acclaimed author revisits the artists whose works help us better understand what it means to be human. Elegant, startlingly original, and provocative, Encounter combines many of the author's signature themes with personal reflections and stories.
By: Milan Kundera
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The Art of the Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 34
Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the postpsychological novel.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Informative and Inspiring
- By Mo on 11-27-21
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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Never Let Me Go
- By: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 10,488
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 8,387
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Story4 out of 5 stars 8,400
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Be patient; it will pay off
- By Kc on 05-23-05
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
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The Actual
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 3 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 5
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 4
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Story4 out of 5 stars 4
Harry Trellman doesn't belong. Not in the Chicago orphanage where he is sent by his mother, not in high school (too brainy), not even on the streets. Human attachments? Yes, he has them, but they are like everything else in his life, singular and irregular. People who know him say that he "drowns his feelings in his face", and that he has a Mongolian "masked look". But though Harry stands apart, he has always been a most keen observer, listener, recorder, and interpreter, and none of this is lost on the Chicago billionaire, Sigmund Adletsky, who takes Harry into his "brain trust".
By: Saul Bellow
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Symposium
- By: Plato
- Narrated by: full cast
- Length: 2 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 446
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 355
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 354
The Greek word sumposion means a drinking party (a fact shamefully ignored by the organizers of modern symposia), and the party described in Plato's Symposium is one supposedly given in the year 416 BC by the playwright Agathon to celebrate his victory in the dramatic festival of the Lenaea. He has already given one party, the previous evening; this second party is for a select group of friends, and host and guests alike are feeling a little frail.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Greek Philosophy over a Good Wine
- By Cathy on 02-16-06
By: Plato
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My Antonia
- By: Willa Cather
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings, Ken Burns (introduction)
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3,122
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,620
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2,634
Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland, with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of a fateful sleigh ride, Antonia's desperately homesick father and self-indulgent mother, and the coy Lena Lingard. Holding the pastoral society's heart, of course, is the bewitching, free-spirited Antonia.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Good book
- By Sher from Provo on 03-31-14
By: Willa Cather
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A Prayer for Owen Meany
- By: John Irving
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 27 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 10,831
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 9,009
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 8,997
Of all of John Irving's books, this is the one that lends itself best to audio. In print, Owen Meany's dialogue is set in capital letters; for this production, Irving himself selected Joe Barrett to deliver Meany's difficult voice as intended. In the summer of 1953, two 11-year-old boys – best friends – are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is extraordinary and terrifying.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Outstanding
- By Alan on 03-28-11
By: John Irving
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Midnight's Children
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Lyndam Gregory
- Length: 24 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 2,013
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,599
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,584
Salman Rushdie holds the literary world in awe with a jaw-dropping catalog of critically acclaimed novels that have made him one of the world's most celebrated authors. Winner of the prestigious Booker of Bookers, Midnight's Children tells the story of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of India's independence.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Outstanding book, superb narration
- By MarcS on 06-09-09
By: Salman Rushdie
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The Martian Chronicles
- By: Ray Bradbury
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3,920
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3,458
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 3,444
Bradbury's Mars is a place of hope, dreams, and metaphor - of crystal pillars and fossil seas - where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn - first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars...and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The Original. Great Stories, Great Narrator.
- By Troy on 04-05-16
By: Ray Bradbury
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The Myth of Sisyphus
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 988
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 820
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Story4 out of 5 stars 821
One of the most influential works of this century, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide; the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Brilliant work, excellently narrated
- By Richard B. on 04-30-19
By: Albert Camus
What listeners say about Laughable Loves
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- RL
- 12-04-23
insight in men's nature
Playful writing with interesting twists. I miss the 20th century writers. They had such a deep insight in human behavior.
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Ingrid
- 02-07-24
Really hard to follow
I’m not sure if it was that he had so many girls that it was hard to track or what was it but the book was so hard to follow I felt that there were so many stories that it became boring and the stories did t connect I had no interest in continuing after chapter 45. I still had 5 more hours to go and it felt like a tedious task… not enjoyable anymore.
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