Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2790 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-21
• Original language: Czech
• Binding: Paperback
• 328 pages

Review
Like the much-praised (little-read?)Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980): another Kundera collage - part narrative, part speculative, combining erotic, political, and metaphysical elements. The philosophical frame is quite shifty this time, moving from notion to notion: consideration of the need for heaviness in existence (lack of weight equates with anomie, lovelessness, terror); kitsch; relations with animals; a theory of Paradise based on the denial of excrement. And, in these scattered sections, Kundera seems more often coy than profound, his apothegms usually verging on the commonplace. ("A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibility, describe the boundaries of human existence.") On the other hand, interest quickens whenever Kundera turns to his narrative: the plight of a disenfranchised Prague surgeon, Tomas, and his photographer-lover, Tereza - mirrored by a Western couple, Swiss professor Franz and his painter-mistress, Sabina. Both couples are involved in oblique investigations of the spirituality and freedom of sex - as tested against the lack of spirit and freedom in the world at large. There's one powerfully touching, thoughtfully charged section rendering the death of Tomas and Tereza's old dog; the prose offers a few luminescent touches that are quintessential Kundera. ("Then he pulled off her panties and she was completely naked. When her soul saw her naked body in the arms of a stranger, it was so incredulous that it might as well have been watching the planet Mars at close range.") But, apart from these moments, the book generates little accumulating power: the oddness of its format requires great reader-patience - a patience that's rewarded only with evasive suggestion. And though Kundera's seriousness and natural grace are everywhere, they are finally beetled by the feckless anemia of the collage/pastiche approach. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

The power of ideas...
Milan Kundera has the uncommon ability to twist and manipulate words to their full value and extract from them meaning that is not at first obvious. Throughout `The Unbearable Lightness of Being', he plays a game of word association that enables the reader to view his philosophical concepts in an entirely new light. At the crux of this game lies the debate between `weight' and `lightness' both of which can be considered `good' or `bad', if such crude divisions exist. However behind the metaphysical, Kundera delves into the very real emotions of his characters that he describes as being `born' of particular circumstances and ideas. Most effectively he captures the restlessness of Tereza whose `vertigo' forces her to constantly re-examine her life and what she seeks from it. Tomas is arguably the pivotal point of the novel, but Kundera creates all of his characters with incredible care. The time dedicated to each really pays off while at the same time Kundera slowly draws the reader into the philosophies of Nietzsche, Descartes and Parminides as well as his own conclusions about life and its mysteries.
`The Unbearable Lightness of Being' is utterly the best book I have read in a long, long time and I would recommend it to absolutely anyone, regardless of their taste in fiction. It is powerful, moving and thought-provoking and if I could give it any more than five stars I would. Please read this book!

Definitely needs to be read more than once.
This is an unusual book, and well-worth reading just for its originality. I like what Kundera has done in using a novel as the basis for philosophical speculation. I'm not sure how much validity there is in his philosophy. I've read Russell's History of Modern Philosophy, and don't remember coming across anything in there about excrement being closely related to divinity! But whether or not Kundera's musings have any firm backing from respected philosophers is neither here nor there. Some of them seem to make sense, and all of them are entertaining.
On the down-side, because he has used the novel in this way, the story is not particularly exciting, and the characters are not especially well-developed, perhaps with the exception of Tomas, a man you have to admire for carrying the aroma of several women's groins in his hair! I like the fact that all of the chapters are short, though I don't mind long chapters if the narrative is gripping. It isn't in this book, though the final few chapters are very moving, even if providing a somewhat curious end to a book. I will certainly re-read this book at some point. It is a book one might need to read several times before fully grasping everything the writer has to say, and this is no bad thing.

Weird indeed...

... but weird is in no way bad. As a start, the story captures your attention from the very first page and the book is hard to put down. The plot itself is not really the central issue, but the thoughts that Kundera puts down whenever he thinks of something and thereby interrupts the thread of the plot. I wouldn't think it is a too "professional-philosophical" book. Kundera asks questions that I am sure cross any ordinary man's mind at some point in life. The way he attempts to answer them is very distinct in his own Kundera-way and opens our eyes to ways of thinking that might have never crossed our minds.

The characters are very real, natural and familiar. I like the comment of one of the other reviewers saying that we "love and hate them at the same time" - just as we basically love and hate everyone else around us simultaneously - including ourselves.

A must-must-must read! Not too "philosophical", believe me.. Rather comfortable and familar in a "weird" way.