The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera
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Book Summary Information
Author: Milan KunderaTranslator: Michael Henry Heim
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-04-07
ISBN: 0060932139
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780060932138
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Book Review: ES MUSS SEINIt Must Be! (Beethoven)
Summary: 5 Stars
...But Es könnte auch anders sein" (It could just as well be otherwise)... With a sweeping, stunning backdrop of Communism and the Prague Spring, Kundera's book probes the questions surrounding personal identity and individuality and what shapes lives and how people are robbed of individuality. As an entire society struggles to be recognised as an independent entity under threat of Russian tanks and violence, the characters seek individuality in their own ways. Indeed, this individuality is personified by the way each character perceives and feels love.
The story of Tomas and Tereza, Sabina and Franz, as people, is compelling and beautiful (and tragic) enough. Kundera's writing style and rich, philosophical prose is all the more rewarding. It took me years to finally sit down and read this book, and I regret all the wasted time. The book is far more rewarding than the film of the same name because the prose is so deep and worthwhile. The film, too, is good because Lena Olin and Juliette Binoche are luminous as always. Daniel Day Lewis plays Tomas well because his real persona seems to fit that of Tomas so perfectly.
Tomas is a doctor in Prague and happens to meet the woman who will be his wife, Tereza, when he travels out of town for some sort of conference. They meet by a number of chance occurrences, and the novel Anna Karenina is instrumental in bringing them together. "Early in the novel that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition-the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end-may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on the condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive", "fabricated", and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic". Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion." "But is not 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."
Tereza deeply believed in these episodes of chance and fate, believing their meeting was destined to be so. The more scientific Tomas was more inclined to believe, "It could just as well be otherwise." Tereza did not know at first that Tomas was a reckless womanizer and that this would come to define both of them as their relationship progressed and in fact would be what further robbed Tereza of her individuality. Early in the prose, you learn that Tereza's mother was cruel and deprived her of privacy and modesty. Tereza's adult life is permeated by a sense of needing to feel different from and unique from others. With the love of a man, like Tomas, she expected she would find that he loved her and her alone, but his ceaseless, obsessive womanizing turned her into just another woman, just another body for him to use, in no way unique from any other woman in the world. Tereza had nightmares about her position. "She had come to him to escape her mother's world, a world where all bodies were equal. She has come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceable. But he, too, has drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them all alike, made no, absolutely no distinction between Tereza's body and the other bodies. He had sent her back into the world she tried to escape, sent her to march naked with the other naked women." Tereza began to see life as a concentration camp-people living cramped together constantly in a "complete obliteration of privacy."
Tomas had many lovers, but among the most important (and central to the book) is Sabina. Sabina desired to disobey her father: "Communism was merely another father, a father equally strict and limited, a father who forbade her love..." Sabina, like Tomas, could not be confined to one lover. She wanted to disobey convention. Not only did she have Tomas, she had many other lovers, including another central character to the book, Franz. Franz is from the West (I cannot recall whether he is from Austria or Switzerland, but I suspect the latter). For Franz, "(Love) It meant a longing to put himself at the mercy of his partner. He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defence against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall. That is why I can say that for Franz, love meant the constant expectation of a blow." Franz believed, "Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your (Sabina's) former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities."
Eventually Sabina and Tereza meet one another, and they form an unlikely friendship, and they both share the need for privacy that drives Tereza's search for identity. The book describes a private and intimate scene in which Tereza (who is a photographer) and Sabina photograph one another, in various states of undress. They see one another for the individuals they are, not through the lens of Tomas or external barriers.
Recurring images appear throughout the prose to illustrate different people's places in other people's lives, their relationships, perhaps. Kundera writes, "While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them." Kundera goes on to include a "dictionary of misunderstood words" which describes how words can be interpreted differently by different people depending on so many factors. (As an example, WOMAN, "not every woman was worthy of being called a woman."
The characters all played roles with regard to the revolution that swept through Prague and eventually was crushed by Russian tanks. Tereza reflected on their naïveté. They had been so stupid, spending their days taking pictures of tanks and subversion. They believed they were risking their lives for their country when in fact the evidence they produced only helped the Russians in the end when the Russian overpowered the revolt.
Many people tried to claim that ignorance about what Russian Communism entailed would serve as an excuse, but ignorance, as Kundera explains, was no excuse for Oedipus. "Whether they knew or didn't know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn't know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?"
"...Oedipus did not know he was sleeping with his own mother, yet when he realized what had happened, he did not feel innocent. Unable to stand the sight of the misfortune he had wrought by "not knowing", he put out his eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes."
Everyone was suspect and everyone ready to hide from the ideals that began the revolt in the first place. Tomas was reprimanded at work and was told to print a retraction to an article or letter he had written, and he faced an odd decision as well as unusual reactions from those around him, "And suddenly Tomas grasped a strange fact: everyone was smiling at him, everyone wanted him to write the retraction: it would make everyone happy! The people with the first type of reaction would be happy because by inflating cowardice, he would make their actions seem commonplace and thereby give them back their lost honor. The people with the second type of reaction, who had come to consider their honor a special privilege never to be yielded, nurtured a secret love for the cowards, for without them their courage would soon erode into a trivial, monotonous grind admired by no one."
Kundera delves into various subject matter, such as the matter of excrement, "Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man's crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man...; The fact that until recently the word `shit' appeared in print as s--- has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can't claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: shit is acceptable (in which case don't lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner." He also pontificates on how the animal world and the treatment of animals serves as an apt commentary on people, "The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fow
Summary of The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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.
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