The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (Harper Perennial Deluxe Editions)
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. Kundera's first since "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting." 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 private actions, but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.
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Community Reviews
It took a nudge from a trusted friend for me to pick this one up. Like many other great books, it seemed almost banal when I read the dust jacket summary. Once I got into it however, I really connected with it on two levels.
The first was the characters - both their depth, and the fact that there were only four of them. In fact, I would argue that Franz was such a minor character, there were really only three. (I guess if you count Karenin, the dog, we're back up to four...) I learned a lot about my own ideas as I found myself drawn to or repulsed (seldom, BTW) from the characters' behaviours.
Second, on a more superficial level, I really enjoyed the backdrop of central Europe during the iron curtain era, and the street level perspective of the Prague Spring of 1968. Other sources give a good macro level account of what happened leading up to, and following the crackdown, but this takes the reader to a more dark and intimate place.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being spurred me on to read Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Also great, but not 8/10...
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