The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Twentieth Anniversary Edition [Hardcover]

'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' follows the lives of Tomas (a Czechoslovakian surgeon), his wife Tereza and his mistress Sabina during the Prague Spring of 1968 and the turbulent years that followed the event.

At heart, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the story of how three very different people attempt (and repeatedly fail) to reconcile their differing views of love. Tomas, for example, has promiscuous sex with as many women as possible, but he is only in love with one woman - his wife. For Tomas, love and sexuality are distinct and separate entities, and he has no moral scruples about loving one woman while sleeping with many:

"Tomas came to a conclusion: making love with a woman, and sleeping with a woman, are two separate passions, not merely different, but opposite. Loves does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)."

By contrast, Tomas' wife Tereza believes in marital fidelity - she loves her husband and blames herself for his womanizing life-style. Her despair in life comes from an unresolved personal mind-body dualism; she believes that Tomas loves her soul, but not her body. This fundamental difference in sexual behaviour is the conflict that underpins the entire novel - there's a heartbreaking pathos forged out of the relationship between Tomas and Tereza; their great depth of feeling is persistently tested by their irreconcilable views of love.

The third major protagonist is Sabina, an artist with an unusual take on the concept of `betrayal'. Sabina feels oppressed by her parochial ancestry and the artistic limitations imposed on her by the communist occupation. As a result she deliberately distorts - in a highly visual manner - the everyday objects that surround her. One particularly memorable scene has Sabina straddling a mirror on the floor of her studio, completely naked except for her father's bowler hat. This serves as her own personal deconstruction of her father's puritan legacy and turns the conservative image of the bowler hat into a symbol of her sexual emancipation.

But I don't want to rant on about the characters too much, because by far the most interesting voice in the novel is that of the narrator. Although he is never formally named, he speaks with a first-person identity and possesses an intimate knowledge of the characters and their actions. It's probably safe to assume that the voice of the narrator is actually the voice of Milan Kundera himself.

This narrator is the source of a great deal of comedy in the novel - for no sooner than a scene is over does the narrator immediately start to critique the action. He often criticises the characters, their behaviour and even, in some brilliantly observant and hilarious acts of humility, the actual writing of the novel.

This creates an unusual reading experience. It's almost as if Kundera wrote two books - one of them a novel, the other a harsh yet humorous critique of the novel. He then mashed them together into one coherent volume, so that the reader receives a running-commentary on the events of the book as they occur. My description probably doesn't do it justice, but I assure you, this works brilliantly well.

Further to his practical criticism, the narrator also engages in long philosophical speculations; this is what really sets the novel apart from all others that I've read. The philosophy is relevant and enlightening, yet simultaneously very tongue-in-cheek. The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins by challenging and dismissing Nietzsche's idea of eternal return (the concept that everything occurs and recurs ad infinitum), but then the novel constantly replays the same scenes over and over to the reader - albeit from different perspectives.

The narrator will open up a philosophical discussion by defining his terms in a charmingly idiosyncratic manner. These terms will then recur throughout the novel. As the narrator introduces more and more concepts into his discussion, the language of the text becomes more and more esoteric. So much so that, by the end of the novel, there is such a breadth of specific terminology being used that the final fifty pages or so would barely make any sense to somebody who hasn't read the first few hundred. In other words, Kundera develops his own secret philosophical lexicon and shares it with the reader. This successfully creates a unique feeling of intimacy between narrator and reader, who share a common language, unknown to anybody else, exclusive to this narrator-reader relationship.

The novel's philosophy is as broad in scope as it is focused in linguistic detail. Kundera rigorously analyses what it means to `be' in the world by exploring some unusual but striking contrasts. Sexuality is examined through multitude, not intimacy. Politics is explored through love and marriage. There's even a long, very funny and thought-provoking attempt to reconcile the act of being God, with the fact of bowel movements. The narrator even muses, as I've glossed over, on the creative operational aspects of writing:

"Characters are not born like people, of women; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered, or said something essential about."

'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' is a wonderful book. It's tragically moving yet charmingly funny and self-aware. Pathos and philosophy, comedy and culture criticism all merge seamlessly and intelligently. If I was forced to draw any criticism against it, it would be that the narrator is significantly more interesting than any of the characters, but this is a very minor complaint. At worst you might argue that the book is merely a love-story masquerading as philosophical didacticism; at best The Unbearable Lightness of Being may inspire you to re-assess what it means to be in love, be in work, be political; in fact, you may find yourself questioning what it means to `be' in the world altogether.

The story is of Tomas and Tereza, and whether they will stay together despite Tomas's constant infidelity. Branching out from this central story are other stories, following the lives, for example, of Tomas's mistress Sabina and her new lover Franz. The central theme is explored through the lives of the various characters. Is it better to be light or heavy? Lives full of responsibility and attachment are heavy and burdensome, but "closer to the earth", "more real and truthful." Lives that are light contain no burdens and allow a person to soar, "his movements as free as they are insignificant".

Sabina abandons her family and everyone who means anything to her, and ends up in America selling her paintings, making money, doing well and feeling empty. She has no burdens, no attachments, no real meaning or purpose. She composes a will saying she wants to be cremated and her ashes scattered on the winds. "She wanted to die under the sign of lightness". Tomas, on the other hand, chooses heaviness. He has opportunities to escape from his burdens - he gets out of Czechoslovakia and is living in Vienna, for example, but goes back to find Tereza. He loses his job as a doctor because of writing an article critical of the regime, and is offered several chances at redemption by renouncing his article. But he chooses not to, and so his life becomes harder and harder, heavier and heavier.

By the end of the book, the heavier life comes to seem preferable, to me anyway. It has more sorrow, but that's because there is more to care about. Lightness, the absence of ties or emotional attachments, is easier on the surface, but ultimately meaningless, and therefore unbearable.

I also enjoyed the "Short dictionary of misunderstood words", a series of chapters in which Kundera shows how Franz and Sabina think they understand each other but don't, because they are using the same words to mean different things. They have met relatively late in life, and are old enough to have accumulated their own meanings and associations and memories, of which the other person is not a part. Whereas Tomas and Sabina were young and could create their own meanings together, Franz and Sabina are too old to do this.

I thought this was a great insight, and the book was full of them. Kundera is a close observer of the human condition, and always finds fresh, innovative ways of expressing his ideas. I had high expectations of this book, and it easily lived up to them.

I happened to pick this book up by accident. Intrigued by its title, I read through the first two pages. It was very dense, and I thought it would be a hard read...but it flowed easily while touching many philosophical questions. As you followed the characters along, you realize how the characters represent what is human in all of us. This book was an amazing experience. Kundera develops the characters so well, that you become very attached to them. They become a part of you. Kundera also beautifully describes their thoughts and experiences. He puts into words everything you have thought about life and people and (mis-)communication but never really made it to the surface of your thoughts. A wonderful read that keeps you captivated until the end. It's not difficult to read, but you will constantly be thinking.