The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Masterplots II: World Fiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Milan Kundera
- First Published: 1984
- Type of Work: Postmodernist
- Time of Work: The 1960’s-1970’s
- Setting: Prague, Geneva, Zurich, Paris, Cambodia, and a Czech farming commune
- Principal Characters: The Narrator, Tomas, Tereza, Sabina, Franz
- Genres: Long fiction, Political fiction, Metafiction
- Subjects: Freedom, 1960’s, 1970’s, Communism or communists, Politics, Love or romance, Exile or expatriates, Betrayal, Doctors, Adultery, Switzerland or Swiss people, Czechoslovakia or Czechoslovakians, Cambodia or Cambodians
- Locales: Zurich, Switzerland, Prague, Czechoslovakia
The Novel
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a complex postmodernist novel, at once political, philosophical, and erotic. Milan Kundera’s characters live in a world of irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, where the public and private spheres overlap and impinge upon each other. In this novel of ideas, the characters’ actions are viewed through the narrator’s erudite perspective and in terms of a number of cultural allusions, including Parmenides, Sophocles, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Leo Tolstoy.
The allusions to Tolstoy’s Anna...
[The entire page is 2185 words long]
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