The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel | Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel | Milan Kundera | Magnificant

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The Unbearable Lig...

	The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel Milan Kundera Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 250 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Unbelievable Loveness of This Book

Milan Kundera has epitomized what lonliness and life is like in and out of love/lust. I enjoyed the author's insight into each character. He takes time to expose their flaws and explain only what is necessary. I enjoy this book every time I read it.

Magnificant

Love, philosophy, intrigue - this book has it all. Kundera is a master of explaining the human psyche and delving deep into the mind of simple men and women, to create a story about human nature.

A Thinking Man's Novel

This book will make you think. You may or may not feel any particular affection for the characters. I can't say that I did. But they do seem real, with wonderful jealousies and reservations and habits of thought and emotion guiding them through life, ever so haltingly. Noone is innocent, but noone is guilty either. Life teeters between joy and suffering, but how can it truly be suffering when one knows there will be joy again? And by the same token, how can it truly be joy, for it is so very transient, until the next period of suffering. Indeed, as short as life is, how can suffering truly be suffering and joy truly joy when it is so close to ending in either sense? But still we are jealous, still we are hesitant, still we give into desires, still we love, and need to be loved, and hurt those we love, and care for those we love, and if ever we spend time thinking too much about how soon it will all be over, well, we might just be inclined to not care at all, although we still would.

Rare is the novel, or the anything, which leads you to think you might have some new flash of insight as to how the whole damn thing works...

You have to tip your cap to Kundera and say, good job. Does he see more since he saw it though the prism of communism, and its peculiar form in Prague? Or would a man such as Kundera been able to paint a similar picture in pre-WWI England, or the golden years of California, or the roaring twenties of NYC? There is something universal here. I feel I have only scratched the surface of what he was trying to communicate.

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A New Experience

I cannot offer many of the erudite reviews of my peers, however, I did read this book and have been thinking about it since I finished a few days ago. It seems to be well written, with themes that I would call profound. The amazon summary puts it nicely: "...one that requires of listeners a dollop of patience." This book had some very interesting philosophy in it that will keep me thinking for a while. About the nature of love and its power on people, about fidelity and sex and death. However, I must note that this was not an easy read for me. I may often make the mistake of choosing books in which I can "learn" some secret to life, and while this book did impart some new wisdom upon me, it was slow and difficult to continue at certain times, at least for my current preferences.

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