Kitsch is the enemy of every artist, of course, but it has special menace for the artist who has made his way out of the abyss of "totalitarian kitsch" (as Kundera calls it), only to find himself peering into the chasm of Western anticommunist kitsch. Kundera, who left Czechoslovakia in 1975, after he was expelled from the Communist party for the second time and could no longer publish or teach there, now lives in Paris and works in an increasingly—what to call it?—abstract, surreal, "poetic" idiom.

His need to experiment with form is surely connected to his personal vendetta against the puerilities of "socialist realism" and its "free world" counterparts….

His novels have all the unpredictability and changeability of mountain weather, and are marked by an almost compulsive disregard for the laws of genre. Like a driver who signals right and promptly turns left, Kundera repeatedly betrays the reader's trust in the conventions that give him his bearings in a novel….

Near the end of his novel Life Is Elsewhere (1969) [for example], Kundera steps out from behind the curtain of his narrative—the sardonically told story of a mamma's boy, a young poet who develops into a monstrosity of totalitarian kitsch—and speaks of his restiveness under the constraints of the novel form. "Just as your life is determined by the kind of profession and marriage you have chosen, so our novel is limited by our observatory perspective…. We have chosen this approach as you have chosen your fate, and our choice is equally unalterable," Kundera says ruefully, and then goes on to wonder whether maybe the novelist cannot welsh on his commitment after all: "Man cannot jump out of his life, but perhaps a novel has more freedom. Suppose we hurriedly and secretly dismantled our observatory and transported it elsewhere, at least for a little while?"

Kundera then proposes to write a chapter that will be to the main narrative what a small guest house is to a country manor, and suddenly, without warning, the reader is thrust into one of the most lyrical and heart-rending scenes in contemporary fiction—a scene between a red-haired girl and a middle-aged man (who appears in the novel for the first time) that is of almost unbearable sadness and tenderness…. Kundera describes the scene as "a quiet interlude in which an anonymous man unexpectedly lights a lamp of kindness," and it fades out of the book (which is interesting and sometimes very funny but otherwise never very affecting) like one of those mysterious distinct sounds one hears at dawn and supposes one has dreamed.

In his next two novels—The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and [The Unbearable Lightness of Being] Kundera attempts to recapture this emotional tone while simultaneously experimenting with surrealist techniques. It stubbornly eludes him in the first book, whose surrealism seems somewhat pathetic and outdated, and whose pathos has an "as if" quality: instead of being moved, one is aware of being cued to be moved. But in The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera succeeds in actually creating the work of high modernist playfulness and deep pathos that he had merely projected in the earlier book.

Like Ulysses, it is a book entwined with another book—in this case Anna Karenina, a copy of which Kundera, with his characteristic directness, puts under the arm of his heroine, Tereza, as she enters the novel. He draws on Anna Karenina not in a literal sense—his Tereza and Tomas and Sabina and Franz in no way "equal" Anna and Vronsky and Levin and Kitty. It is the existential dilemma at the core of Anna Karenina that he plucks from the Russian novel and restates in terms of the opposition between heaviness and lightness. When Tolstoy wrote of the vacuous and senseless life of Vronsky and Anna in the country after their forced retreat from society (a life that he had the inspiration of showing through the eyes of the careworn, child-burdened, "excessivement terre-à-terre" Dolly, as Vronsky dismissively calls her), he was writing about the unbearable lightness of being. We keep this state at bay with our marriages, friendships, commitments, responsibilities, loyalties and ties to family, culture, and nation; and we float up toward it every time we commit adultery, betray a friend, break ranks, defy authority, sever a family bond, leave a homeland, or (as Kundera goes beyond Tolstoy in suggesting) attempt to create a work of art. "What then shall we choose?" Kundera writes. "Weight or lightness?" (p. 3)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being has a kind of charmed life. It is like a performance that has gotten off on the right foot. Every door Kundera tries opens for him. In the earlier books, one felt like a passenger in a small plane, swooping and dropping precipitately and heading straight for a mountain; in the present book, one travels by steady jumbo jet. The heavy/light polarity acts as a kind of fixative for Kundera's special sensitivity to the ambiguities and ironies of the position of the Janus-faced political émigré, and to its potentialities as a universal metaphor. (p. 4)

The distinction of Michael Henry Heim's translation lies in the clean precision and elegant leanness of diction through which the novel's taut modernist tone is rendered. In her new novel, Pitch Dark, Renata Adler asks (in the voice of the book's narrator), "Do I need to stylize it, or can I tell it as it was?" To point out that "telling it as it was" is itself another stylization is only to restate the question that has haunted fiction throughout this century. In Life Is Elsewhere, Kundera used Rimbaud's line "Il faut être absolument moderne" as an epigraph. But the modern novelist, unlike the modern painter, sculptor, or poet, cannot absolutely divest himself of realism: the modernist novel is inevitably a hybrid form. Only through the illusion that he is in some sense "telling it as it was" can the novelist sustain the reader's attention and touch his heart. The self-reflexiveness of modern art, its aggressive avowal of materials … can extend only partially to narrative literature. Kundera's work deepens our sense of modernism as a force powerfully pulling at the novelist but never quite taking him over the border. (p. 6)