Milan Kundera is indeed bringing a certain allure and charm back, and it's quite an interesting sight with him donning a bowler cap. The bowler cap gives him an air of mystery and perhaps a touch of an old-world elegance. Kundera has always been a figure who stands out, not just for his literary works but also for his unique presence.

His style, both in his writing and in his appearance, has a certain sexiness to it that draws people in. It's as if he is a walking enigma, captivating those who encounter him or his works. The image of him with the bowler cap becomes a symbol of his individuality and his ability to combine the intellectual with the visually appealing.

Whether it's on the pages of his books or in the public eye, Kundera continues to make an impact, and his choice of the bowler cap only adds to his overall allure and the sense of sexiness that he exudes.

4.5
One of my favorites

I have many hobbies and interests, and among them, one of my favorites is reading. Reading allows me to explore different worlds, gain knowledge, and expand my imagination.

Whenever I pick up a good book, I am immediately drawn into its pages. I can lose myself in a thrilling mystery, be inspired by a heartwarming story, or learn about new cultures and ideas.

Another thing I love is traveling. Exploring new places, experiencing different cultures, and trying new foods is an adventure that I always look forward to. Whether it's a bustling city or a peaceful countryside, each destination has its own unique charm.

In conclusion, these are just two of my many favorites. They bring joy, excitement, and a sense of fulfillment to my life. I will continue to pursue these interests and discover new ones along the way.

Firstly, the literary invitation to abstraction, the signs of the abnormal spiritual and mental state of the author which, throughout the book, in the world of violence and the banner of uprisings (with countless descriptions), stands against everything and everyone, the silent cry of the body of the betrayed in romantic relationships, the inconsistent appearances and disappearances, the struggle of the restless dream of communism, not in his homeland "Russia" and not even in 1968, his adopted homeland "Czechoslovakia" - Kundera's homeland -, during the "Prague Spring", also.

Secondly, the translation is beautiful and smooth and the accurate observance of the punctuation marks by the translator preserves the author's intention from the confusion resulting from the language conversion.

Thirdly, the book is very difficult to read and progresses slowly, and at the same time, in places where the author, while telling the story, also sometimes throws it into the desert of Karbala and presents his ideas and ideals, bit by bit, to the beautiful eyes and mind of the reader, the speed of reading decreases.

I am re-reading this for a book club, and you know? I have an even deeper gut-reaction of revulsion towards the novel than I did the first time. I am changing my rating.

This time, the high rating is not an indication of whether I liked this primarily philosophical and literary book. Quite the contrary. However, I did think the writing style was easy to read and I liked that. The translator and the author were experts at what they did: translating and a unique, sometimes playful, writing approach, to serious ideas.

I liked almost nothing else about it. It was so intellectual and foreign it was as emotionally dry as a sterile desert or as a dictionary of words. This is one of those books which was hard for me to grasp because of the underlying messages and the ugly (intentional? - I have no idea) surface imagery, yet I can see it is a product of an intelligent, educated and thoughtful writer.

I think overtly this was a book of philosophical musings about the meanings of life, love, politics, the body/mind duality, whether the body is beautiful or ugly, happiness, fidelity, loyalty, historical significance, sex, the tangible and intangible, communism, art, metaphysical symmetry, and people as Muses (which may seem flattering) that result in meh or meaningless or unjustified outcomes. It encompasses a lot, and perhaps does so smartly in terms of Literary Modernism. Subconsciously, I suspect the author was constipated.

The 'plot' consists of characters, who are created for purposes of pure intellectual illustration (not entertainment or affection), that live and act through the Russian takeover of Czechoslovakia. Various Czech characters respond to the Communist regime in a bloodless philosophical two-dimensional fictional world, except when thinking about naked women or having sex, in which case they get spacey like people having a psychotic episode. They lose jobs, undergo social victimization, loss of freedoms of speech and respect, yet they find some meaning in loving each other. At least Tereza and Tomas do. Two other characters, Franz and Sabina have a bit of success, too, but perhaps arguably, and they seem to self-realize more realistically, if still too philosophically, unless having sex. Much of Kundera's philosophical angst happens to apply to other circumstances beyond the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, at least accordingly to other reviews, especially about love (?!?) and sex (?!?), so, many readers have become ecstatic over another possible Great Book for the Canon - but not me.

Since Kundera's characters were mostly symbolic creatures either built from mental existential angst or as demonstration pieces artfully carved out from philosophical concepts made flesh (and perhaps the author's being derisively critical of Literary Modernism?), the characters appeared like aliens from another galaxy in their responses to sex, bodies, relationships, marriage, etc. Or are Eastern Europeans of the 1970's so intellectually different in language, culture and Art that their mental/sexual strategies are beyond my American, lower-middle-class, interpretation? It definitely reminded me of some art French films made in the 1950's and 1960's that I've seen on TCM with subtitles. Or is it simply culturally different in the general sense similar to how we Americans hear cats 'Meow' but the Russians hear cats 'Myau'. I don't know.

The inner dialogues of Tereze and Tomas (the heroes) were icky icky icky. Who thinks like these two? For instance, genitals having itches or smells or being used in sex isn't news to me, but paragraphs of personal neurotic obsessional thoughts which circle around and around (anal pun is intended - Tomas has an insistent anus fixation, and one of the women has to have sex immediately after picturing herself emptying her bowels) about women eliminating body wastes (not many thoughts about men's bodies by anyone), encompassing obviously some sort of interior symbolic but completely off-the-wall weirdness. All the while during pooping and pissing in front of each other or alone, or thinking about poop or piss they solemnly pontificate on the meaning of their relationships and their love lives and how female body images (almost never male imagery) determine life choices - these psychological insights and musings were more like using an anus thinking deep thoughts instead of a brain dripping words from a mouth. I finally understand why most literature in restrooms tend to be joke books, even if scatological - much more palatable than serious bowel-inspired philosophical desperation.

The pages of sex, bodies, love, vagina and anus arousal were so bizarre I thought maybe the author was a virgin! He definitely had a sphincter obsession. I wonder at what Tereza was actually smelling in Tomas's hair......

My confusion began with an early scene:

\\"Hoping to alleviate the pain in her heart by pains of the flesh, she jabbed needles under her fingernails.\\" A dream, thankfully, she does not really jab her fingers, but Tereza is disturbed by this dream and tells Tomas. So, \\"He took her fingers between his hands and stroked them, brought them to his lips and kissed them, as if they still had drops of blood on them.\\"

Ick! This is love? First, her extreme anxiety, second, his being turned on by her bloody self-abuse and torture. Ewwww. But Tereza is definitely the biggest idiot in the book, so don't waste your sympathy. As the book goes on, she is an embarrassment to the human race, and of her sex. If there is a wrong decision to make, or a crazy feeling to have, she will do it. She is Tomas's toilet bowl as well as Muse, or maybe Moses, but Tomas is a complete cad as well as idiot, too. He is a doctor, but I wouldn't let him near my nether regions!

Sabina, a painter, is Tomas's lover, even after he marries Tereza. Sabina and Tomas play around before and during sex. Sabina likes to occasionally play around with a bowler hat, wearing it while naked, which she inherited from her dead father, the only thing she had taken from his estate. \\"But suddenly the comic became veiled by excitement: the bowler hat no longer signified a joke; it signified violence; violence against Sabina, against her dignity as a woman.\\"

Huh? Despite two pages of remembrances involving the bowler, at no point did any of it make any connection, to me, to Sabina's dignity as a woman being violated violently with disrespect. Yet, it is clear to the author and some of his characters.

Usually each scene in the book plays out in a similar manner: something happens, then an interior dialogue occurs full of mental angst, self-discovery and allusions which make absolutely no sense to me or with any visible connecting ideas, despite the quite clear explanations of their thoughts that are supposed to allow me to follow the insightful conclusions. However, the conclusion or end result or feeling IS quite clear, even if the process to get there is a complete mystery. I know how and what happens. What completely is mystifying me is why these characters are experiencing their personal dysfunctions, even after pages of supposed character musings, insights after incidents and consequences of explained emotion-based errors of judgement. Yet, there ARE wonderful insights and descriptions, somehow arrived at after senseless mistakes and choices.

Sabina is not a horrible person, in fact, after Karenin, I liked her best, as far as I could like these peculiar unintentional space aliens. Her pursuit of 'lightness' meant having hundreds of lovers. Her relationship with Franz, another important character (the book revolves around Tereza, Tomas, Sabina, Franz and Karenin) sinks because he cannot cross the abyss of understanding about the bowler hat. To him it has no meaning, so he feels uncomfortable when she wears it and doesn't know why. Huh? What? I don't get any if this, neither Sabina's insight or Franz feeling ick or especially, how this scene is emblematic of their deadly misunderstandings. There follows a completely lucid and amazingly wonderful paragraph comparing how the creation of meaningful motifs when young are still pliable but when people are older motifs are more complete, yet more inflexible. How this wonderful observation fits the preceding revelations that the bowler sets off is beyond me. The computing of it is bizarre.

Many many scenes are like this. The serious interior monologues that these characters fill these pages with left me scratching my head in puzzled frustration. It was like trying to enjoy jokes told by Martians I just met about people from Pluto, without my having any context or knowledge of a single atom of either of their cultures. For example, in simpler terms, it was like reading a book of incidents described like this: a rock fell down and rolled two inches, and suddenly I knew green was my friend's favorite color, so I hated her for the rest of my life knowing she would cut my car's brake lines after my funeral, The End.

When I was a young, and even middle-aged, lass, if a book was praised by the New York Times, the New Yorker and other esteemed organs of literary knowledge, and given accolades, awards, and acclaimed status, and I also, in the reading of the book, could clearly see the obvious erudition of the author, I would have swallowed hard and joined the crowds clapping in ovation. Now, I feel free to admit I think this a bit overwritten and a lot disgustingly weird. If it is supposed to be 'post-modern', well, ok, then. I actually believe the author was making fun of modernism. If I'm right, then I 'got' it, but geesh. This was such an unpleasant book!

I felt as if the book's characters (and those of the Artistic reading audience) are the type of people who get intellectually stimulated and artistically ecstatic over the discovery of a genital hair floating in a glass of water during the eating a bowl of soup which had been served dreamlike by a deformed undefinable person dressed in colorful wallpaper remnants, hands smelling of poop, thinking this is some kind of intellectualized romantic Art significance. Sorry, but I can't even pretend to a New York City or European intellectual cool at this level of artifice. Why do Modern Art communities of Europe and New York City of recent decades think poop and piss and genital emanations and the acts of pooping and pissing and eating genital hairs and blood in almost every paragraph or project are so emotionally and socially truthful and impactfully symbolic that it all should and will be smeared luridly into the face of every viewer until they embrace Birth-Life-Death-Beauty in this 'exciting' expression of 'the human condition'? Isn't this actually very childish and demented? An ugly naked emperor who believes himself dressed in Couture as Truth and Art, instead of juvenile thrills?

I want to write about something I liked: the dog. I disliked every single character, with the exception of Karenin, the dog. The dog was cute and dog-like, a natural crowd pleaser, but unfortunately, s/he was only peripheral to the action. However, there is more to the eye about Karenin than being a lovable fictional pet. The name is a homage to a famous novel, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. The dog is female, but the couple who own the dog, Tereza and Tomas, decided to ignore its sex and Karenin is referred to as a male throughout the book. This kind of sex obfuscation, and the naming after an important character created by a famous author with an equally fascinating real life history is never done as an accident. There are literally hundreds of books analyzing and critiquing the book 'Anna Karenina', as well as hundreds of biographies about Leo Tolstoy. Tereza was carrying the book 'Anna Karenina' when she meets Tomas. But eventually, I didn't care about whatever meaning that was supposed to be in the renaming and sexing of this dog. Karenin ended up being the only likeable element for me as a breathing character. So what if s/he is a joke or reference on the endless deconstruction, symbolism and analysis of literary ideas and tropes? I liked the dog, and only the dog.

This book is entirely an ick, even if I think the book deserves a high-ish rating. I also thought the movie 'Animal House' was ick, and now some people consider the movie a life changer or a movie that defines a generation. I suppose it does. I still think it is stupid and ick. Whatever message(s) is here in 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being', which is perhaps a sarcastic one on an artistic style popular in literary history, as well as genuine angst about love, relationships and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, it did not reach me except to cause distaste.

I can recommend this book only as a curiosity read and a brain exercise. However, I guess New York intellectuals and artists find it a deep and intelligent book, as do European intellectuals. I thought it a literary joke played on intellectuals by a clever writer using Modernism -isms, but he did have an honest ax to grind about Communism, women in love, and being in love or in relationships with women. He does not like women in love, I think, even more than he hates Russia, equating marriage and women and Communism as heavy being states that smother happiness. He seems to regretfully accept relationships are necessary evils, since women must love and men must feel sorry/need for them, (over) powered by the sex drive as he assumes we all are. Although I think these scenes about love and desire were Kundera being 'real' and honest, I was offended by the, too obvious, male depiction of these particular women and their motivations. All of the characters seemed like they were expressions of the one-sided view of the same man at different ages, or with different women through the years, and putting it together as a novelistic representation.

If I'm missing whatever is supposed to be 5-star GREAT about this book because of my ignorance of literature or misunderstanding the plot, will someone please enlighten me?