Broadly speaking the power source motoring this novel is the battle between arguably the two most fundamental and often conflictual drives in the human psyche - the desire for commitment and the desire for freedom. Commitment Kundera classes as heaviness; freedom as lightness. "When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. Sabina had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being. Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love were gone - what was left to betray? Sabina felt emptiness all around her. What if that emptiness was the goal of all her betrayals? Naturally she had not realized it until now. How could she have? The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us. Sabina was unaware of the goal that lay behind her longing to betray. The unbearable lightness of being - was that the goal?"


"The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a basis of kitsch." One of my favourite themes explored in the book was the role kitsch plays in our lives. Empathy is often created through kitsch. American cinema knows and exploits this. The tearful reunion at the end of the film makes us feel good about the human race. "It is always nice to dream that we are part of a jubilant throng marching through the centuries..."

Kundera is often at pains to point out we don't respond privately to an experience as we would collectively. "Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing a most incredible sensation. Leafing through a book on Hitler, I was touched by some of his portraits: they reminded me of my childhood. I grew up during the war; several members of my family perished in Hitler's concentration camps; but what were their deaths compared with the memories of a lost period in my life, a period that would never return?" This is not the reaction he ought to be feeling. He's showing us what he privately feels is at odds with the prescribed feeling. And we understand there's often an element of kitsch in the proscribed collective feeling. Because we're pretending we favour the interests of the collective over the personal. "For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies."

But Kundera isn't too hard on kitsch in our personal lives - "She knew only too well that the song was a beautiful lie. As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition." It's the role kitsch plays in politics that gets his back up. "Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements." Of course, it's blatantly apparent how much of political and nationalistic and military theatre is pure kitsch. The Nazis took kitsch to a whole new level. It would be comical to watch now if we didn't know what it led to. A whole nation bamboozled into idiocy by kitsch. "Political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on the fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch." National anthems bring it out - the absurdly stiff posture, the clenched fist on heart. Taking pride in something as random and unearned as nationality is little but hollow posturing when you think about it. Nationality is not something you have achieved after all. It's simply the result of a thrown dice. And the same nationality can evoke an inexhaustible number of different images in any given individual. It's essentially a bogus idea of unity.

Totalitarian regimes include nations which historically denied women equal rights, countries which enforced racial segregation and persecuted homosexuality. "But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears." Which is why women in early 20th century Britain, blacks in America and gays throughout the world were constrained to exaggerate pride in a factor of their lives they had no control over, their sex, their skin colour, their sexuality. And when we see films now about these struggles kitsch is always present. They enable us to feel we are part of the jubilant throng marching through the centuries... Everything is perhaps ultimately turned into kitsch.

This probably isn't quite Kundera's best novel but it's a fabulous and inspiring read for all its wisdom and the playful possibilities of fiction it embraces and dramatizes. "As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself? Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one's own stomach during a moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one's fist with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying one's wit before hidden microphones-I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become."

There is probably one novel that is the most responsible for the direction of my post-graduation European backpacking trip ten years ago which landed me in Prague for two solid weeks. Shortly before my friend Chad and I departed, he mailed me a letter and directed me to get my hands on a copy of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Just read it, he wrote. Whatever else you do, just read this book. It is about everything in the world.

Being already a Kafka fan of some long-standing, I was quite open to another absurdly minded Czech telling the story of his city and by extension the rest of the world. The title itself was familiar, though not the author’s name, and I rather innocently mistook Kundera for a woman at first glance at the cover.

Suffice to say, Kundera had me at the very first paragraph. Has any other modern novel had such a wonderfully philosophical opening than this one?
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?

In two sentences, the very first two, Kundera not only manages to break several writing rules of style (an exclamation mark, followed by a direct address to the reader being the most obvious), but he also succinctly sums up one of the most challenging philosophical concepts, yet is wise enough to address it on its own terms: as a “mad myth.”

From the earliest possible chance, the author is telling us that he is indeed an intellectual, that he writes energetically, playfully, and that serious Ideas with the full timbre basso profundo tolling out that capital “I” are the very pith and marrow of novels and are not to be stuffed, labeled, and set up high on a shelf reserved for great thoughts too refined and delicate to mingle among the common rabble of characters and dialogue and action.

Needless to say, this is a heady mix, the kind of thing to go straight to a recent college graduate with literature and philosophy on the brain. And we haven’t even touched on the sex yet. Kundera’s books are rife with sex, sex is the other engine driving this dually powered writer, sex both passionate and routine, sex filled up with deep emotional meaning and sex stripped down to its tangible physicality, sex as recurring motif in one’s life illuminating greater insights into one’s personality and sex as secret door into the aesthetics of our time.

To write, as some have, that the book is primarily about erotic encounters is as much as to say that Beethoven was a guy who played piano. Instead it is a book about tyranny, the large and the small, the ones we endure and the ones we resist, the ones we submit to for love and the ones that always rankle silently. The tyranny of kitsch, as understood by the novel, kitsch to mean a subjective, sentimental folding screen that hides away the sight of death. The questions that the book seeks to explore circle around the ideas of polar opposites, truth and lies, love and hate (or indifference), freedom and slavery, heaviness and lightness.

The Kundera style is a very delightful bit and piecework manner. We focus on one character, that character’s perceptions, that character’s perspectives, in little miniatures, some essay-like, that elaborate on the character’s psychology or history. Then we shift to another character and learn new things about that person, sometimes touching on the same pieces we’ve seen already. It’s like Rashomon but more expansive, drawing circles around lives and eras instead of merely one night’s events.

Part of what Kundera does is move the story along through first one person, then go back in time and retell only some of that story focused on a second person and demonstrate how our best attempts at comprehending each other remains woefully inadequate. There will always be layers fathoms below our drilling. Yet at the same time, Kundera moves the story forward, stops, switches character again and in this third instance either goes back to person number one or switches to person number three and repeats the process, and repeats again. What emerges is rather like conflicting court testimony, multiple moving parts simultaneously illuminating their own motivations and obscuring others’.

If there is a weakness to all of this it is that Kundera’s novels sometimes develop the quality of theoretical exercises between characters embodying certain philosophical conceits. While the author may touch the mind and the libido, the heart often remains chilly. There is a sense of artificiality when you stare too longly at the book’s constructs, as though the author were merely embodying an essay with puppets for illustrative purposes. Though what precisely does lie behind our disagreements and disconnections from others than differing mental states? We fall out of love with someone not because of the size of her bottom or his new haircut, but because our lives shift in differing directions and we can no longer think in the same cohesive manner with the other person. Our ideas become different. What are our wants but our ideas given concrete form and targets?

“Metaphors are dangerous,” the author writes more than once throughout the novel. “Metaphors are not be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.” So thinks the novel’s “hero” Tomas, the epic womanizer, as he reflects on how he came to love Tereza who is soon his wife. This couple, a marriage dancing around secrets and each of the partner’s inability to communicate finally the truth about who they are to their spouse, is used for comparison and contrast with Franz, a middle aged married professor in Switzerland who is in love with one of Tomas’ exiled Czech mistresses, the artist Sabine. Their stories are told against the backdrop of the Russian invasion and subjugation of Czechoslovakia during the Cold War.

Kundera twines their two stories together examining how love can either lift us up to heights of ecstasy or weigh us down with its solidity and unchangeable reality — then poses the surprising question: which condition should we view as the negative in binary opposition? Is it the uncentered lack of gravity that makes love real and powerful or does that quality make us too airy and flighty, unserious when we most need it? Or rather can it be love’s grounding quality that allows us to feel with stability the other’s existence — or does that weight merely pin us down, smother us with its heft? Can it be both? Can it be that when couples part it is because what is lighter than a breeze for one has become a leaden drag on the other?

This is push and pull of ideas and language and sentiments is beautifully illustrated in the novel’s third part, titled “Words Misunderstood,” in which Kundera examines how Sabina and Franz’s inability to understand the terms the other uses leads to their separation. This is done through a sort of anecdotal dictionary that allows each character to demonstrate their grasp of an idea. The shortest bluntly captures some of the magic of this portion:

CEMETERY
Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colorful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks as though the dead are dancing at a children’s ball. Yes, a children’s ball, because the dead are as innocent as children. No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, in Hitler’s time, in Stalin’s time, through all occupations. When she felt low, [Sabina] would get into the car, leave Prague far behind, and walk through one or another of the country cemeteries she loved so well. Against a backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby.
For Franz a cemetery was an ugly dump of stones and bones.


And this too is part of the novel’s recurring genius. At every stage, there is an elegiac note to happiness as though all these dances have been gone through before, as though all love affairs, even should Nietzsche be wrong, carry within them the seeds of their own endings. Franz and Sabina’s inability to even understand each other on very basic levels dooms their romance from the beginning. Their tragedy is commonplace and follows a pattern as though ritualized.

Tereza and Tomas’ marriage we see is held together only by each other’s willingness to commit to it and to some third greater thing than either of themselves, though what that third thing is neither of them understand. For each of them separately, it is a kind of death to be together and a kind of death to be apart, and together their momentary happinesses are a kind of staving off of this specter.

Kundera nicely ends The Unbearable Lightness of Being, foreshadowing what happens later after the closing scenes, which gives the novel a sadly sweet tone instead of merely tragic. Instead of simply ending with death, as a kind of negation, the book closes with sleep, part of the circling motif, the cycle we go through, our lives one passing hoop.

After my initial reading of the novel, I found myself rereading it immediately, going through all of it again, underlining passages, committing certain ones to memory. Over the years, I have returned again and again to this novel, more than many others, much more than Kundera’s other novels despite my having read them repeatedly as well. To return to Kundera’s world is like reliving your best relationships (and maybe your worst ones as well), but reliving them as though you had been smarter, wiser, deeper at the time than you really were. It is a kind of exorcism and a kind of nostalgia and it is a beautiful example of writing that matters, beyond all else, writing that matters.

I felt this book was contrived and to me it seemed as if the author tried desperately to sound intellectual. Instead he came off egotistical. First off all the meandering about Nietzche and quite frankly he set me off to start off by making statements I couldn't agree but he goes right on as if it is a trueism that everyone must believe in.

To be quite frank the characters were boring. The prose was uninteresting. There was no emotion, no real depth, and how many times to I have to hear about him pluking the woman from the reed basket - please!

Another reviewer mentioned slogging thorugh life and this book - I couldn't agree more - it was a chore and that's not what we read for. I finally "gave up the ghost" so maybe I shouldn't review it since I've not read it all the way through but bad is bad, and I can't see how this was going to turn itself around.

This author has created a facade - he talks a good story, with lots of smoke and mirrors with words that sound intellectual but there is no real depth there.

(Overrated) Rhetorical games, combined with recurrent references to Nietzsche and Beethoven, create an intellectual facade that seems much weightier than it really is. Built on many false presumptions and bolstered by an epic, scholarly tone, the novel has potential to be interesting in its musings, but just can't be taken seriously as a work of philosophical or psychological depth.

I would recommend that people avoid this book - There are so much better uses of their time.

Robin
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Medieval fantasy series: The Crown Conspiracy (Oct 2008), Avempartha (April 2009)
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4.5
Jeden z moich ulubieńców

13% and I'm done.

I have had a run of books that have bored me, or annoyed me, or just did nothing for me. This one is... You know, I don't even know how to describe this one.

I pretty much hated it from the first page. I do not understand the high rating on Goodreads for this book. I can barely stand the thought of picking it up again and reading more of the words telling me things about characters that I could not possibly care less about.

We have Tomas, whom we meet standing on his balcony and vacillating between whether he should ask a woman that he's "in love with" (read: met in a chance encounter and became infatuated with) to move in with him. He's saved from making any kind of fucking decision by her showing up on his doorstep (literally) with her bags packed and ready to move in. Which she does. And then she clings to him (literally) every night - to the point that he controls her sleep patterns. He even, charmer that he is, fucks with her partially-asleep mind and tells her that he's leaving her forever, so that she'll chase him and drag him back home.

Tereza (that's the woman - I had to look up her name) begins to have nightmares that he's cheating on her and forcing her to watch after finding a letter from a woman in Tomas's drawer describing that very thing. So then, in the course of a sentence, we learn that Tomas has never stopped womanizing, then that he lied to Tereza about it, then tried to justify it, and now just tries to hide it from her, but won't stop.

And she stays. He gets her a dog, because the dog will hopefully "develop lesbian tendencies" and love Tereza, because Tomas can't cope with her and needs help.

So yes, Tereza not only stays, but marries him.

Why? *shrug* The book said so.

So then war comes, and they relocate... but after a while Tereza leaves Tomas (taking the female dog that they named Karenin and now refer to using male pronouns... Maybe to make Tomas feel as though Tereza has a lover as well? Who knows. This book is so stupid...).

She leaves him, and I think, "About frigging time." There's no reason for her having decided to leave him NOW, as opposed to any day of the 7 previous years of dreading him coming home smelling of another woman, of fearing that every single woman she sees will be her husband's next conquest. She decided to leave now... because the book said so.

And then he realizes that he can't be without her, and goes to her, and she takes him back, and then he realizes he feels nothing for her but mild indigestion and "pressure in his stomach and the despair of having returned".



I am a character reader. I need characters that I can identify with, that I can understand, maybe like... but these were none of those things. I don't know them, I don't understand them, I don't identify with them in any way... and I don't want to.

I just want to stop reading about them.

And so I did.

Milan Kundera’s book was the first title I added to Goodreads back in 2013. Despite that, it took me a while to finally read it. I guess I was a bit afraid that the philosophy dense prose will be too much for me without background in this subject. I needn’t had worried as I enjoyed most of it and I did not feell overwhelmed.

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can either compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come”

I believe that Kundera’s characters are searching for the ideal life without actually knowing which one it is and they are confused about what is the direction they should take. They make life altering decisions and then they feel chocked by them. However, when considering the option to go the other way and free themselves there is the fear that the road could lead to their peril. Having the ability to make choices gives one power but can also be overwhelming.

The author is saying that, since we live only one life, our decisions are difficult to make as there is no comparison. However, as we live only one life our decisions do not matter much in the big picture as reputation increase the importance. As Tomas puts it, Einmal is keinmal.

“The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. “

I feel like the characters are trapped by the social and political environment, their own choices and the incapacity to realise what they want from life.

There were some parts I did not enjoy as much about the book. I was a bit furious with the misogyny of Kundera and wanted to shake Teresa to come back to her senses. She said she wanted more from her life and then she ends up accepting a cheating husband although it made her miserable.

رواية تقيلةو مكتوبة بطريقة مختلفة وعبقرية في نفس الوقت ..هي مش رواية بالمعني المتعارف عليه..يعني هو مش بس بيحكي عن أشخاص الرواية لكن كمان بيحلل شخصيتهم بطريقة فلسفية..ومفيهاش ترتيب الروايات التقليدي..
كتاب مش سهل ومنكرش إن في لحظة حسيت إني مش فاهمة حاجة وكنت مش حكمله..بس مع الوقت بدأت أستوعب واحدة واحدة..
هل فهمتها كويس؟أكيد لأ..
هل كان عندي حق إني كنت خايفة من كونديرا؟آه طبعاً..طلع مرعب:)
والسؤال الأخير هل حقرأ لكونديرا تاني؟ أكيد

LEGGEREZZA?


Daniel Day Lewis, Tomas, e la sua amante Sabina, interpretata da Lena Olin.

Non so se sarebbe cambiato qualcosa andando nel giusto ordine, prima il libro e poi il film.
Non lo so perché in effetti con Kundera non ho mai avuto un buon rapporto: non sono mai riuscito a penetrare la sua arte che mi è sempre sembrata troppo incline al filosofeggiare, all’illuminismo, e forse perfino voce sentenziosa.



Comunque, le cose sono andate che prima ho visto il film ed è stata una delusione.
Delusione perché ho stima di Philip Kaufman: ho apprezzato The Right Stuff – Uomini veri e anche la sua versione del classico Invasion of the Body Snatchers – Terrore dallo spazio profondo, e The Wanderers – I nuovi guerrieri dal romanzo di Richard Price.
Ho ancora più stima del suo sceneggiatore Jean-Claude Carrière, che solo la collaborazione con Luis Buñuel rende mito e leggenda.
E poi il protagonista, Daniel Day Lewis, forse il più grande attore della storia, se non altro il più grande tra i viventi.
E Lena Olin che sembrava potesse sollevare il mondo.
E Sven Nykvist a illuminare. E…


Juliette Binoche è Tereza, la moglie tradita e sempre innamorata.

Ma il film non funziona. È troppo lungo, tanto più per i suoi tempi (quasi tre ore). Ha momenti di assiomi più che dialogo. Ha un ritmo regolato su un metronomo, il che è tutto meno che un complimento (morte di ogni sorpresa…).

E così sono approdato al libro maldisposto. E il pregiudizio non ha giovato, è stato purtroppo confermato.

Qualsiasi studente nell’ora di fisica può provare con esperimenti l’esattezza di un’ipotesi scientifica. L’uomo, invece, vivendo una sola vita, non ha alcuna possibilità di verificare un’ipotesi mediante un esperimento, e perciò non saprà mai se avrebbe dovuto o no dare ascolto al proprio sentimento.

I was hesitant to start this, and figured for awhile that it would be one of those books that maybe I’d get around to or maybe I wouldn’t. It just didn’t seem like something I’d enjoy – it seemed too soft, or too postmodern, or too feel-good, or too based in hedonism, or too surface oriented. What caused me to give it a shot was the simple fact that I’ll be traveling to Prague in a few weeks, and since the book's setting takes place there, I figured it may put me in the mood for the trip. I figured it was “now or never” in regards to reading it. And yet, even with that being the case, I hesitated a bit. That is, until the mere mentioning it received an almost overzealously positive response from two close friends (whose opinions I hold in high regard). Their response was so enthusiastic that I was pushed over the edge; shoved into thinking that the novel’s chances of being lame had been lessened, and that it would be worth the trial.

And I’m glad I decided to give this book a shot. Damn glad.

The novel traces the lives of two couples during the Soviet occupation of Prague, during the late 1960’s. The novel deep-heartedly charts their struggles against communism, their pasts, their lovers, and themselves.

Kundera observes the stuff that goes on internally amongst the characters; he intellectualizes it, and tells you about it. He’s quite philosophical, and you feel like the narrator is talking to you, offering very insightful observations about the characters and life in general. This is one reason why reading is often more valuable than watching TV or a movie: when reading a good book you get direct psychological explanations, and you get to go inside the heads of characters.

Taken as a whole, I found this novel to be profound, but in unusual ways. It’s not a direct novel, but rather one that represents, and lets one feel, disconnections and various glimpses of perceptions. And it wasn’t a smooth novel, either. It even felt choppy on occasion. But the chapters are short, which fits its feel, and also gives you time to think about the penetrating thoughts that Kundera puts across. Kundera strikes me as a craftsman of sorts. He switches timelines deftly and effectively – even when I thought he was crazy to do so; when I thought he gave up the climax of the novel towards its middle, he proved me dead wrong. He proved to me that he knew exactly what he was doing because he’s a master of the craft. This novel is not full of sweeping, pounding paragraphs of poignant, soul-hitting, philosophical depth, but rather offers up constant glimpses; nuggets of insightful observations on almost every page, that when added up together, reveal an impressive, heartfelt, and real work.

I love the way this novel portrays love. It recognizes and represents its beauty while at the same time showing how psychological and manipulatable it can be. The loves in this novel are accurate ones, not at all cheapened by gimmicky slogans or conventional lines. "The dance seemed to him a declaration that her devotion, her ardent desire to satisfy his every whim, was not necessarily bound to his person, that if she hadn't met Tomas, she would have been ready to respond to the call of any other man she might have met instead."

Kundera brilliantly portrays how simple things like our past, our country, images, family – even metaphors, can affect our psyche and major life decisions. "Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love."

Its fragility and delicacy: "What would happen if Tomas were to receive such a picture? Would he throw her out? Perhaps not. Probably not. But the fragile edifice of their love would certainly come tumbling down. For that edifice rested on the single column of her fidelity, and loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away."

"Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now."

Sometimes even one sentence can say a lot: "Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love."

"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."

And it’s worth reiterating that the philosophical ideas in this novel are very thought provoking: "Tomas thought: Attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever had."

The importance of our decisions. The lack of importance of our decisions. The unavoidable importance of life. The unavoidable lack of importance of life.

That's how this novel feels.

If I'm to give a book five stars, it needs to affect me in some profound ways -- it needs to change me, at least a little. This novel has affected my view of life; how I see the world. Specifically, it’s helped me better understand beauty. I have trouble elaborating on that because beauty is such an abstract concept; you know it when you see it, or rather— you know it when you feel it. Beauty has some melancholy; it is appreciative -- special but fleeting -- and never fully absorbed as its full whole. Maybe that's a major aspect of beauty -- knowing it is beyond your grasp. Beyond you.

Life is ultimately a crapshoot. You don't know what's going to happen. You might as well hang on to something. And that something might as well be love -- whether it be plutonic, romantic, or, if you’re lucky, both. And if that's what you're going to hang on to (and you are), then you might as well understand its simplicity and its complexity, and its beauty -- you might as well understand and appreciate as much of it as you can. It only makes sense that you do.

This novel can help you do that.

Kundera is an unconventional writer, to say the least. If you are looking for fully fleshed characters or a smooth plot, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is not for you. Kundera merely uses plot and characters as tools or examples to explain his philosophy about life, and that is what this novel is all about. He will provide a glimpse of his characters' lives, hit the pause button and then go on to explain all about what just happened, the philosophy and psychology which drives the lives of his characters and often real lives as well. In keeping with this format, the novel is fragmentary in structure. It is easy to see how a reader can get annoyed at the author's getting lost in his philosophical musings so very often. But if you can find some meaning in those, the novel just might work for you.

Decisions and dilemmas. Kundera's characters seem to searching for an elusive something, trying to find that perfect place in life where they would want to live forever. However, it is difficult to know for sure the direction in which that perfect place lies. If they find their current lives suffocating, going the other way could be liberating. But is it worth leaving behind all that will be lost? The moment they take a step ahead, they begin feeling the pull of what they had just turned their back to. Often the choice is not between perfection and imperfection, it is a trade-off.
The ability to shape our own lives, to some extent at least, is a power. Sometimes it can be a burden too. Specially when there is no way of knowing what waits for us at the next corner. Do we choose being happy today at the expense of 'What ifs..' plaguing us tomorrow? Or do we put us through an ordeal now in anticipation of it paying off in the future? What if we end up in a mess, unable to turn back?

"And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not run in circles; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition."

Sometimes we can find the right answers only in retrospect.

"We can never know what we want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."

Kundera speaks of the irony of human life. Having only one life to live, makes the life choices difficult and onerous. It is also because of this very fact of living only one life that these life choices do not have much weight in the bigger picture. And it is this irony which causes the unbearable lightness of being. The only thing that relieves us from this unbearable lightness are fortuitous occurences which, love it or hate it, have a say in making up our lives.

"They (human lives) are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif , which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life."


Love. Kundera does not speak of love in a poetic, all-beautiful manner. What happens when one of the characters packs her life in a suitcase and goes off to be with her lover? Is there music in the air, fluttering butterflies? No. Her stomach makes a rumbling sound the moment she sees her lover...because she hasn't eaten anything all day.

"If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders."

Finding love does not miraculously solve all their problems. Love is often accompanied by jealousy, mistrust, lies, deceit, pain. Yet they do find some strength in love and do all they can to hold on to it.

""Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end.""


Along with these, Kundera touches upon a few other themes as well. Some of those hit the right note, while there were parts that I found trite or pretentious or simply lacking any sense. Take this for example. One of the characters sleeps with every other woman who crosses his path. Kundera philosophizes his physical desire and explains it as a deep-seated intellectual curiosity. Naah, I don't buy that. Then there were pretending-to-be-deep quotes that just went over my head.

"Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

Umm, What?

Another thing I found odd was that the author breaks the fourth wall and tries to be defensive about the novel. He comes in and explains how he is not just telling a story, but investigating human lives. He tells us that the characters are merely figments of his imagination (so we shouldn't expect them to be realistic). He tells us that it is wrong to chide a novel for mysterious coincidences (so we shouldn't question the unrealistic events in the plot).
Agreed there are some flaws, but I would have forgiven them even without the author explaining himself away.

ΚΟΥΝΤΕΡΑ ΣΕ ΑΓΑΠΑΩ





Και θα σε αγαπάω απο δω και πέρα είτε με την αγάπη που βρίσκεται στο πεδίο της βαρύτητας,είτε με την αβάσταχτη ελαφρότητα στη ρευστότητα του κόσμου.



Μου έμαθες απλά λιτά και απέριττα όποτε μπορώ να επιλέγω εγώ μια απο τις δυο ιδιότητες: βαρύτητα-ελαφρότητα.

Αυτό το μυθιστόρημα που αυτομάτως πέρασε στα αιώνια αγαπημένα μου είναι ένας ύμνος δοξολογίας γραμμένος στις χιλιάδες παρτιτούρες του κόσμου προς τον έρωτα.
Μέσα και βαθιά σε αυτή την μοναδική γραφή κρύβονται απροκάλυπτα πολιτικά,φιλοσοφικά,μουσικά,ποιητικά,θρησκευτικά και ιστορικά αφηγήματα.
Είναι ένα πολυδιάστατο έργο,ένα πρωτοποριακό γραπτό απλό και κατανοητό ενώ πραγματεύεται θεωρίες,σημασίες,έννοιες και πνευματικές αναζητήσεις που ταλαιπωρούν και βασανίζουν την ανθρώπινη ζωή απο καταβολής κόσμου.


Όλα έιναι τόσο απλά τόσο συγκεκριμένα. Φτάνει να κατανοήσεις ότι τίποτα δεν επαναλαμβάνεται,ότι ποτέ δεν θα υπάρξει δεύτερη ευκαιρία στο ανθρώπινο ταξίδι της ύπαρξης μας με "πρώτο"προορισμό τη γη.


"Δεν μπορεί κανείς ποτέ να ξέρει αυτό που πρέπει να θέλει , γιατί έχουμε μόνο μια ζωή και δεν μπορούμε ούτε να την συγκρίνουμε με προηγούμενες ζωές, ούτε να την επανορθώσουμε σε ζωές επερχόμενες.
Το να μην μπορείς να ζήσεις παρά μόνο μια ζωή, είναι σαν να μην τη ζεις καθόλου".

"Το τυχαίο είναι που κάνει τέτοια μάγια, όχι το αναγκαίο . Για να είναι ένας έρωτας αξέχαστος πρέπει τα τυχαία να συναντιόνται σ΄αυτόν από την πρώτη στιγμή".

Έτσι ξεκινάει ο έρωτας του Τόμας και της Τερέζα.
Η Τερέζα μια συνειδητοποιημένα ευαίσθητη σερβιτόρα αγαπάει κτητικά,δίνει τεράστια βαρύτητα στο φορτίο του έρωτα της και υποφέρει απο ζήλεια για τις ερωμένες που αφθονούν εξ αρχής στη ζωή του Τόμας.

Ο Τόμας καταξιωμένος χειρουργός διάγει έναν βίο άκρως ερωτικό προς όλες τις γυναικείες υπάρξεις ψάχνοντας με χειρουργική ακρίβεια να βρει αυτό το κάτι διαφορετικό που κρύβεται στις απόκρυφες στιγμές της γυναικείας ψυχής. Για τον Τόμας ο έρωτας και η σεξουαλική πράξη είναι διαχωρισμένα γενετήσια ένστικτα. Χωρισμένος, με έναν γιο που αρνείται να τον δεχτεί στη ζωή του γιατί γυναίκα και παιδί θα του χαλούσαν την αβάσταχτη ελαφρότητα. Θα τον καταδίκαζαν στα "πρέπει" που μισεί ή και όχι...


"Ο έρωτας αρχίζει από μια μεταφορά. Μ’ άλλα λόγια : Ο έρωτας αρχίζει από τη στιγμή που μια γυναίκα εγγράφεται με μια από τις κουβέντες της,στην ποιητική μας μνήμη".

Ανάμεσα στις ερωμένες του Τόμας η Σαμπίνα. Μια καλλιτέχνιδα που απολαμβάνει τη ζωή χωρίς δεσμεύσεις και μέσα στην απόλυτη ελαφρότητα του είναι της θεωρεί πως χωρίς προδοσία η ύπαρξη δεν έχει νόημα,γίνεται απελπιστικά προβλέψιμη. Έτσι αρνείται τον μεγάλο της έρωτα τον Φράντς όταν αρχίζει να την βαραίνει με αποκλειστικότητα και επιλέγει για μια ακόμη φορά την ιδιότητα της ελαφρότητας.

Η Σαμπίνα ταξιδεύει πολύ για να ξεφύγει απο όλα.
Ο Τόμας επισημοποιεί τη σχέση του με την Τερέζα αλλά το πεδίο της ζωής του δεν αλλάζει. Προτιμάει πάντα την ελαφρότητα.

Όλα αυτά πραγματοποιούνται λίγο πριν και μετά την "Άνοιξη της Πράγας".Η ρωσική εισβολή του 1968 και οι κοινωνικές και πολιτικές αλλαγές δεν αφήνουν κανέναν ανέγγιχτο. Οι ζωές των ηρώων μας επηρεάζονται και συνδέονται με όλες τις εξελίξεις.Το "κιτς" του κομμουνισμού δέρνει συνειδήσεις.

"Σε μια κοινωνία που κυβερνά ο τρόμος οι δηλώσεις δεν σε δεσμεύουν σε τίποτα γιατί τις αποσπούν με τη βία κι ένας έντιμος άνθρωπος έχει το χρέος να μην τους δίνει σημασία,να μην τις ακούει".

Το τελευταίο κεφάλαιο "το χαμόγελο του Καρένιν" μου κομμάτιασε την καρδιά. Ο Καρένιν είναι το θηλυκό σκυλάκι που ζει τα τελευταία δέκα χρόνια με τον Τόμας και την Τερέζα.
Κανένα ανθρώπινο πλάσμα δεν μπορεί να κάνει σε ένα άλλο τη δωρεά του ειδυλλίου. Μόνο το ζώο μπορεί γιατί δεν το έδιωξαν απο τον Παράδεισο. Η αγάπη ανάμεσα στο σκυλί και τον άνθρωπο είναι ειδυλλιακή. Χωρίς συγκρούσεις,χωρίς σκηνές,χωρίς εξέλιξη.
Χαράζει γύρω απο τον άνθρωπο τον κύκλο της ζωής του που είναι θεμελιωμένος στην επανάληψη και περιμένει το ίδιο πράγμα απο αυτούς.

Ναι, η ευτυχία είναι επιθυμία της επανάληψης.

ΚΟΥΝΤΕΡΑ ΣΕ ΑΓΑΠΗΣΑ!!



Καλή ανάγνωση.
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.

I have a bone to pick with Kundera and his following. People, this has got to be the most over-rated book of human history. I mean, references to infidelity alone (even infidelity that makes use of funky costumes like '50s ganster hats--the only note-and-applauseworthy aspect this book!) do NOT make for good literature, and such is The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in a nutshell. The male protaganist is, hands down, a one-dimensional and boring buffoon, while the female protaganist is lackluster and underdeveloped. This book is not but chicken soup for those obnoxious, lonely intellectuals who wish they could be playaz, and therefore admire Dr. Love's trite antics. In addition, Kundera's references to philosophy and Beethoven were clearly extracted from a cracker jack box. In conclusion, the emperor has no clothes! Kundera-following (and you are the majority), free yourselves (!), and stop pretending that this book is good.