Book Review: The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

I'd read Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being a few years ago while I was in 6th Form, but had never actually owned a copy, then for my birthday this year my best friend bought me one!  

It's a postmodern text and mainly takes place in and around Prague and explores the lives of Thomas (surgeon), his wife Tereza, his lover Sabina, Franz (professor), and Franz' son Simon during the Communist period in Czechoslovakia.  The book explores the relationship and distinctions between sex and love, and the whole notion of identity and autonomy.  It was intended to challenge Nietzsche's theory that ideas and events in life will occur again and again in a never ending cycle; instead, Kundera attempts to argue that what happens in one's life will never occur again (hence the 'lightness' in the book's title; it does not matter what we do, since we get but one life and our actions today will have no lasting repercussions, and so we should live 'lightly'). Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence is the opposite of lightness, since the knowledge that what we do in this life will occur again and again in lives to come, forces a 'heaviness' on us to think and act in a certain way.  Thomas' casual attitude toward his infidelities are borne from his belief that sex and love and two separate things; he has regular sexual encounters with other women, but claims to only love Tereza. Love is a fleeting, temporary thing in his mind, and as the novel progresses, Tereza's fear that she is nothing but another 'body' to Thomas overpowers her, and she turns her love instead to her dog, Karenin - a creature she puts all her trust and faith in.  It is only through Karenin's death at the novel's end that Thomas and Tereza feel united in their grief.

At times I found the book a bit dense, a bit too preachy instead of telling a story, but I enjoyed it much more than I did the first time round. I love books where the story is told from the perspective of different characters rather than just one point of view, and I definitely learned a lot from reading it.  Parts of it reminded me of Orwell's 1984, and I loved that book too. I'd definitely recommend reading this book if you're into postmodern stuff; it's not a light summer read but it's not too long and I really couldn't put it down once I'd started. I hadn't sympathised with a character as much as I did with Tereza in so long, and I guess that's a sign of brilliant writing. 

Steph x

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