Is it appropriate to begin a review of Milan Kundera with a rhetorical question? Are all questions rhetorical? In a 1980 interview with Philip Roth published as an afterward to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera said: "The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything." The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera's fifth novel, is an unquestionable triumph, a Socratic monologue bearing abundant wisdom….

Why does Milan Kundera write like no one else in the world?

Kundera's father was a prominent pianist, and he himself worked for a time as a jazz musician. Two of the principal figures in his first novel, The Joke …, Ludvik and Jaroslav, are a clarinetist and a violinist, respectively. Music furnishes the metaphors by which many Kundera characters live….

Human lives in Kundera are composed like music, and his novels are constructed like orchestral variations…. [Each] has seven sections. The new novel [The Unbearable Lightness of Being] is less a septych, a sequence of seven consecutive episodes, than a septet, a fugue on several characters, ideas, and incidents that recur throughout. In recounting the intersecting lives of Tomas, Tereza, Franz, and Sabina, in Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, France, Thailand, and the United States, Kundera's technique is circular and polyphonic rather than linear and univocal. He described his last novel as "a polyphony in which various stories mutually explain, illumine, complement each other," and might have done the same for his new one as well. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he paid tribute to musical variations: "The variation is the form of maximum concentration. It enables the composer to limit himself to the matter at hand, to go straight to the heart of it."

The Unbearable Lightness of Being exhibits this maximum concentration as a set of variations on the experiences of a few Europeans in the aftermath of the Prague Spring, and on meditations the author improvises about them. There's anecdotal matter lurking here…. Yet the narrative is curiously detached, the author wryly, wistfully intent on ruminating. In one section, rather than narrate the progress of the relationship between Franz and Sabina, Kundera provides us with "A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words." An examination of the lovers' divergent approaches to such terms as "woman," "parades," "cemetery," "strength," and "living in truth" defines their estrangement and makes it intelligible.

Einmal ist keinmal—"If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all." As an American sage once noted, once is not enough. Kundera reiterates this notion at several points in [The Unbearable Lightness of Being] and it is the basis for the lightness he attributes to unilinear human existence, as if weight were a function of simultaneous alternatives. The book's fugal form provides substance through repetition…. An ordinary memoir or political statement would have been unbearably light: "The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities," Kundera says. They are his chance to imagine roads not taken and linger over contradictory thoughts on eros, spirituality, contingency, tyranny.

For Kundera, the adversary isn't simply Socialist Realism or the scoundrels who seized power in 1968; it's what he calls a "categorical agreement with being." This cosmic complacency is as much an occupational hazard of dissidence as of sycophancy. For all his fixation on Czech capitulation to Russian brawn, Kundera is only obliquely and warily a political writer. The cultural manifestation of metaphysical smugness, the sanitized version of reality he detests, is kitsch: "a folding screen set up to curtain off death." Kundera asks pointed questions about the dogmas of cheer, of "a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist," and these questions levitate The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Kundera's novel is written under the sign of the interrogation point. Its catechism is a strategy for besmirching the hygienic systems that diminish its characters' lives. In posing questions—about the characters' relations to one another, to their author, and to the universe—Kundera is writing no in lightning to a literary regime that demands a very different kind of prose:

In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.

Kundera's ambitions are loftier than tossing verbal stones at Soviet tanks back in Prague or immersing us in the singular lives of one cast of dramatis personae. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is not entirely devoid of the concrete quiddities that are the chief pleasure of traditional realism…. But this spare book dares disturb that universe. "A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence." If a book succeeds in embodying that kind of description, there isn't much more a reader can ask.