The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
by Milan Kundera
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Book Summary Information
Author: Milan KunderaEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-09-30
ISBN: 0061686697
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Book Reviews of The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
Book Review: "Something higher"...
Summary: 5 Stars
... and the vertigo that might accompany it. The fear of falling. Tereza saw "book readers" as a secret fraternity, as indeed, particularly in the audiovisual age, they are. (No doubt, book reviewers are a much smaller sub-set of this fraternity). Tereza aspired to more of life, and perceived books as a vehicle, and arrived at Tomas' apartment with a copy of "Anna Karenina" under her arm. Eventually their dog would be given her last name.
I decided to re-read this novel, and found it even more rewarding than the first time, a time when the "Iron Curtain" still existed. Although Czechoslovakia no longer exists, nor does the nightmare of a police state that is so aptly described, Kundera's novel still dazzles. It simply works at so many different levels. His originality, in thoughts of the human condition, as well as novelistic style and technique, is impressive.
One aspect of the novel is the challenge of living in an openly police state. How some individuals never notice, others are co-opted, others challenge. The fear that everyone is a police spy or informer, that the walls are bugged. Tomas is a highly skilled surgeon, emigrates, returns, and is eventually demoted to window washer. Society loses the skills honed after extensive training, all because Tomas simply "refuses to play the game." He also refuses to play the game of the defiant, refusing to sign a petition (p220) for amnesty, and I thought of Tom Courtney, in "The Loneliness of the Long Distant Runner" - someone who had to be their own person, despite the consequences of not playing the game. If one thinks that the marginalization of the skilled due to their lack of "political correctness" exists only in former communist societies, one need read Thomas Rick's excellent "Fiasco," about the staffing of American civilian positions in Iraq by only the "ideologically correct."
Kundera's erudition is also impressive. There is language itself, music, the manner in which novels are written, ("The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities.") and large dollops of practical philosophy. Numerous are the quotable insights, consider: "A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer... stores up great reserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over their books... The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence." Or: "The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call `poetic memory' and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful...love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."
There are four principal characters: Tomas and the woman "sent to him in a bulrush basket," Tereza, Franz, the professor of leftist causes, and the artist Sabina, of the iconic bowler hat. Some reviewers have criticized Kundera's characterizations, but I found even the minor characters, for example, Franz's wife, Marie-Claude, and Tereza's mother, drawn with powerful insights.
So much of the novel's intensity centers on the most classic subject of the human condition: the relationship(s) with the opposite sex. From: "What is flirtation? One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee." Much sadder, or more cynically is: "Yes, a husband's funeral is a wife's true wedding! The climax of her life's work! The reward for her sufferings!" And for the philander (although Kundera only speaks of the male aspect), he says that it involves the search for the millionth part of dissimilarity between the one person and all the others. In one scene he captured it brilliantly as: "... the frightened expression of equilibrium lost." Kundera wryly works in that unforgettable practical advise for the philander to always make sure you wash your hair afterwards!
Profound, sparkling, witty, and insightful. This novel rates 5 plus stars, and a third read; if one can live long enough.
Summary of The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover -- these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.
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