The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel | Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel | Milan Kundera | Read the novel then watch the film.

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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 247 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Bring a pencil

I finished reading this book about a week ago and still haven't been able to put together a review for it. The book is just too difficult to describe in a short review. There are so many philosophical points that Kundera is trying to make, and he never really gets around to answering the difficult questions that he brings up.

At the root of the philosophical inquiry is the question of whether lightness is good and heaviness is bad or vice versa. It's difficult to explain the problem, and that's probably why I can't find the right words to put together a good review for the book.

If you do intend to read it, I recommend having a pencil nearby to keep track of your own ideas and opinions of the problem, not to mention tracking Kundera's own usage of the characters (including the various government systems in which the human characters live) and how the philosophical question is answered for each of them.

I enjoyed the book immensely, but felt that I needed more time (and perhaps a study guide) to really get all the depth of the book.

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Read the novel then watch the film.

Milan Kundera (1929) is best known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) and The Joke (1967). Because Kundera is more interested in the themes his characters represent rather than their physical appearance, his philosophical novels tend to challenge the reader, though always in a worthwhile way. He believes the reader's imagination completes the writer's vision by filling in the missing details The Art of the Novel.

Set in 1968 Prague, The Unbearable Lightness of Being tells the story of a womanizing surgeon, Tomas, who loses his employment because he is critical of Czech Communism (he compared the Soviets to Oedipus Rex). He has had more than 200 lovers in his lifetime, and is determined to live his life unfettered by things like commitment. "Kundera's Quartet" of characters also includes Tomas's wife, Tereza (a photographer), his mistress, Sabina (a painter), and her lover, Franz (a university professor). The title of Kundera's novel refers to the idea that because each of us has only one life to live, life is ultimately insignificant, and our decisions do not matter. Because our decisions do not matter, existence seems to lose its substance or weight, making our being unbearable. Tomas represents this philosophy in the novel. He feels that nothing matters, that his life has the lightness of mortality. Conversely, enigmatic Tereza carries with her the weight of the world and is heavily impacted by life. She does not judge Tomas for his infidelities, because she knows that although he sleeps with many women, he loves only her. She is fond of animals, particularly her dog, Karenin, and a pig named Mefisto. Her relationship with Tomas is the center of Kundera's novel. After meeting her by chance, Tomas gradually begins to understand through his love for Tereza that, because we only live once, everything matters. The inscription of his grave reads, "He wanted the Kingdom of God on Earth." Sabina lives her life in opposition to "kitsch" in any form, whether it is domesticity, unoriginality, mediocrity, or untruth. Her lover, Franz is a Geneva professor who seeks lightness of being through books and academia, which Sabina also considers kitsch. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a profound novel, and among my top ten favorite novels of the last 25 years. I also recommend the currently out-of-print film adaptation of the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Two-Disc Special Edition).

G. Merritt

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Oustanding

I'm using my girlfriend's account to write this review, so do not blaime her.

This book is outstanding. Most of the reviews focus on the concept of "unbearibale lightness of being" and they do a good job in describing the author's point of view. I don't think this the main point of the book. This idea is really "unbearable" - depressing - and for this reason I never focused on it.

There are four different characters in the book. Together, weighted in different ways, they can almost describe every person. They feel and interpret emotions and situations in different ways; everyone offers his/her relative point of view. The rationale is that everything must be seen from a relative point of view. We always need to keep in mind that something can appear very differently when seen from a different perspective. This is what I really liked.

D.

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Weights and measures.

Whatever I'll write won't do this book justice. It's a classic, plain and simple.
A great Jewish teacher -- Rabbeinu Avraham ben Ha GRA (youngest son of the saintly Vilna Gaon, or "Genius from Vilnius") -- once wrote of he and his forebears -- "We wrote tersely in order to provoke deep thought (in our readers)." Milan Kundera has done that in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being."
Flashes of mental and spiritual wrestling illuminate every page. Religion is judged to be merely a consolation. So says Dr. Tomas in discussing his son's embrace of Roman-style Christianity --
"He was down and out. The Catholics took him in and, before he knew it, he had faith. So it was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple."
But the results of human action are not so simple, as the book demonstrates. Each choice makes a ripple -- picture a stone being tossed into placid water in light of Kundera's arrangement of chapter headings. The headings appear to fan out from "Words Misunderstood" (Chapter 3).
"Lightness and Weight" (the headings for chapters 1 and 4) is a recurring theme. Yet the discussion goes beyond usual freedom-vs.-responsibilities notions. Concepts present in the lives and work of Parmenides and Beethoven are really what's being weighed.
Kundera brings us back several times to the idea that events only happen singly and incline a person toward "lightness" or "heaviness." Kundera seems to favor "heaviness" judging by the book's title and the author's implicit approval of Tomas's "descent" to "heaviness" late in the book.
"Lightness" is a consequence of our lack of knowledge for decision-making due to the fact that presumably we've never lived before and won't live again (meaning we have only "one life to live." By the way, there's an ABC soap opera with that name.)
But is that really all there is to it? Kundera doesn't probe the Jewish idea of the resusitation of the dead, in which souls from "heaven" will be reunited with their bodies and reconstituted mankind will live on a higher plane. The author doesn't hold by the reincarnation of souls -- a different idea that Judaism doesn't rule out but is more prevalent in some other religions.
Perhaps Kundera didn't explore these ideas because they are outside his own and his characters' experiences. Admittedly, the ideas are difficult to get in touch with through physical sense experience. The Communist milieu lived in by Kundera, his characters, and all of us between 1917 and 1989 (and still around to an extent) ruled out everything except that kind of experience. And, when convenient, the Communists even voided that.
An interesting idea for our gifted author and others to take up is "Does reincarnation mean that past lives and lessons learned are imprinted on the soul even if the mind isn't acutely aware of them? What are the implications of this, if any, for our current lives?"

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Lives, Examined.

I almost gave up on this book within the first ten pages or so, such was my contempt for the philosphy and general behavior of Tomas, one of the principal characters in this story and the first one through whose eyes we see the world inhabited by all of Kundera's characters. But I carried on, buoyed by the recommendations of my girlfriend and a young man whose opinion I value. Both recommended this tale of intersection, intertwined relationships in Cold War Europe.

Tomas, a surgeon, is a hedonist who believes "einmal ist keinmal," if we only have one life to live, we might as well not lived at all. Compassion is heavy and undesirable. And so he goes about the collection of sexual experiences with women, "erotic friendships," even as he lives another compartmentalized life with his Wife Tereza. He eventually concludes that sex and love are two opposing things, at least for him; the idea that Tereza might share her body with other men upsets him.

Tereza, a photographer, is aware of Tomas' infidelities and suffers through them by variously ignoring them, engaging in short-lived experimentation herself, and ultimately by sharing her love with an important family pet. The author shares quite a bit of the history of Tereza with her difficult yet much loved mother. That narrative was one of my favorite parts of the book. For a time Tereza leaves Tomas. The latter follows her, invoking Beethoven's "es muss sein!" to describe his love for Tereza. This statement is a motif throughout the book, and changes in meaning. In fact, the author's frequent, wonderful digressions are one of the best parts of the book as he explores changeability in apparent sameness, beauty in weakness,

Sabina, an artist, is one of Tomas' mistresses. Franz, in turn, is devoted to Sabina yet married to another person. One part of the book is devoted to "Words Misunderstood," and follows Sabina and Franz as they experience the same events and places in very different ways. Just because two people are in the same place at the same time doesn't mean they perceive things in even a remotely similar fashion. Franz is an academic and idealist for whom The Grand March, the Platonic ideal of "protest" is an elusive goal.

In later parts of the book Tomas derives much of his strength during his personal and political challenges not from the "es muss sein" for love of his wife, but of his profession. Even his meeting with Tereza, he considers, was born of a series of accidents while his profession was something he chose and pursued through an act of will.

In the end, though, there is a wonderful redemption story as Tereza is frank with Tomas about what he's done to her, and Tomas realizes the pain he has caused and dedicates himself finally to his bride. In bringing the moment of Tomas' final dedication to love, the author makes use of strands of the story that have been woven throught the entire course of the narrative. And in the end, I believe both achieved a "lightness of being."

And I learned a few additional lessons along the way. I would have made a terrible mistake in giving up on this book so early. This collection of stories, the history as seen through the eyes of the four main characters, is told in a wonderful, human voice. When Tereza blushes in front of Tomas, it is explained that she "felt her soul rushing up to the surface [of her body] through her blood vessels and pores to show itself to him." There is much pain in the pages, much physical pleasure, and some joy. The joys that are discovered through difficulty are so much sweeter for that which has come before.

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