[Milan Kundera] has turned interrogation into a literary method…. [In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he] holds up to scrutiny four characters whose lives cross in a kind of cat's-cradle, but more broadly this is "an investigation of human life in the trap it has become."…

Lightness-weight and fidelity-betrayal are only two of the many questions Kundera dissects…. But ultimately, the only questions worth asking are those that have no answers. These "set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence."

Unfortunately, Kundera also lapses into fuzzy metaphysical musings…. [The] ponderous excursis on the musicological-metaphysical weight of Beethoven's Es muss sein, unlike the lively and fascinating colloquy on Moravian folk music in The Joke, seems labored and yields little in the way of insight or information.

In structure, this novel adheres to the pattern of the earlier novel: seven parts, some of which mark returns to previously handled themes, situations or characters. Kundera worries his material in a nervous, circular manner reminiscent of Mahler; he seems never to have done with it. The repeated agitating can be—as it is with Mahler—highly affecting. The themes stick in one's head, humming themselves away. We do well to listen to them.

By temper, subject and method, Kundera is a modernist. With roots in 19th-century formalism, he embodies those elements of the Central and Western European School that we may call Absurd Reality: post-Kafka and post-Brecht. He steps inside, then outside his characters, questioning their motives and—going beyond Brecht in this—questioning his own motives as well.

If The Unbearable Lightness of Being does not achieve levitation to the dizzying heights attained in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, it is nonetheless an achievement of a very high order.