The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Suffice to say, Kundera, again, had me at the very first paragraph. If you’re looking for a fully fleshed characters or a smooth plot, turn around, go away. This is not it.
Published in Kundera’s exile in 1984, and without betraying the title, there is certainly a fundamental weightlessness to this book. Even after the third read, I can only recall fragments about the characters. A tangible milieu, a well-paced plot, and the extended passages of straightforward philosophical and political speculation, made it clear that this is not for readers who prefer the conventional storytelling. An avowedly “postmodern” novel, in which the author withheld so many aspects readers expect from a work of fiction, turned out to become a worldwide bestseller. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, indeed weighed heavier in our thoughts than believed.
If you followed me on NetGalley for long enough, you may know that I am a huge fan of Milan Kundera. His books never failed to whisper directly to the contemporary ear. By 1984, George Orwell’s dystopian vision of a world governed by totalitarian ideologies was viewed to have been fiercely prescient, particularly from the viewpoint of the Eastern Bloc countries. The cold war was at one of the hottest stages it had ever reached, with Reagan in the White House and Andropov in the Kremlin. Yet even in those bleak years, those with hearing sufficiently sharp could notice the first faint creakings of iceberg as it began to shift. Kundera was one of those keen ears to the destruction of the international order.
Lightness and heaviness. Emptiness and meaning. Decision and dilemma. Love and betrayal. The plot explores these ideas through the lives of two couples living in a crapshoot world. The world, and particularly that part of the world where Milan Kundera was still alive. The Eastern Europe has indeed changed profoundly since 1984, but the philosophical concepts appears to be as relevant now as it did when it was first published. This is a philosophical novel, no plot is to be revealed, and there is no plot to reveal anyways. Read it yourself.
And for those philosophy geeks, I’ll drop few words about what I love about Kundera. Kundera is a man of the Enlightenment, and is not loath to champion reason over emotion, pointing out, as he has frequently done in his essays as well as his fiction, that many of the worst disasters mankind has suffered were spawned by those who attended most passionately to the dictates of the heart. Kundera is also an interesting moralist, Kundera has always been a passionate defender of animals, not out of simple sentiment, but in the conviction that it is by our treatment of animals that we most clearly display our essential and unforgivable arrogance as a species. These are the two aspects that attract me to Kundera’s work.
