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The Unbearbable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera
Fiction, 1984, 314 pages (Translated from Czech)
Book Club: NY - B&N Night of Novel Approaches (July, '07)
Ratings: 3.5 (Amazon 4.5)
Summary:From Book Cover: 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.
The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature: Novel by Milan Kundera, first published in 1984 in an English translation and in a French translation as L'Insoutenable Legerete de l'etre. In 1985 the work was published in the original Czech as Nesnesitelna lehkost byti, but it was banned in Czechoslovakia until 1989. Set against the background of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, the novel concerns a young Czech physician who substitutes a series of erotic adventures over which he thinks he can maintain control for becoming involved in his country's politics, where he feels he can have no power or freedom. Inevitably, he is drawn into Czechoslovakia's political unrest. In a parallel vein, he is forced to choose among the women with whom he is involved.
Both summaries above give a brief overview of the novel, each with a different emphasis. The novel is a story of one main couple, Tomas, a physician, and Tereza, his wife. The second couple is Sabina, a painter & Tomas mistress, and Franz, her lover. Kundera uses the lives of these four people to present ideas about the world and "being" as well as to let us know what it is like to live in the political state in Prague during the Russian occupation.
Favorite Passages:What I enjoyed about the book were the ideas presented which gave me something to consider.
pg 40....."an interesting, unusual description of the body and face"
A long time ago, man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what they were. .......
Today, of course, the body is no longer unfamiliar: we know the beating in our chest is the heart and the nose is the noozle of a hose sticking out of the body to take oxygen to the lungs. The face is nothing but an instrument panel registering all the body mechanisms: digestion, sight, hearing, respiration thought.
pg 48....."chance speaks to us"
......his (Tomas) acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six improbable fortuities.
But is no an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?
Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.
pg 185....."life in a police state"
....Since no one had thought to praise Tomas in quite some time, he listened to the plump official very carefully,...... How defenseless we are in the face of flattery! Tomas was unable to prevent himself from taking seriously what the Ministry official said.
But it was not out of mere vanity. More important was Tomas' lack of experience. When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful and polite, you have a hard time reminding yourself that
nothing he say is true, that
nothing is sincere. Maintaining nonbelief (constantly, systematically, without the slightest vacillation) requires tremendous effort and the proper training -- in other words, frequent police interrogations. Tomas lacked that training.
pg 221 ....."characters in a novel"
And once more I see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel: standing at the window and staring across the courtyard at the walls opposite.
This is the image from which he was born. As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thiniks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
pg 222....."our decisions"
And again he thought the thought we already know: Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decision.
Recommendation: I enjoyed to book, but with so many choices on books to read, will probably not read another Kundera book. I was written in an unusual style, things not always happening in sequence. I felt the story was a vehicle to describe his philosophies more than a just a novel.
