Set in his native Czechoslovakia, in the aftermath of the "Prague Spring" of 1968, Milan Kundera's latest novel recounts the experiences of two couples and a dog entangled in the emotional and political intrigues accompanying the August arrival of Russian troops and Soviet order. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the story of Tomas, a respected physician who abandons comfortable exile to return to his native land and falls victim to political oppression; of his wife Tereza, at once tormented by and inextricably drawn to her vision of home; of his mistress Sabina, who escapes to a pointless freedom devoid of all commitments; and of her gentle lover Franz, good, true, brilliant and hopeless. The characters are real enough, and the stage upon which they are displayed broad and imposing. But a fifth character in this novel is the author himself.

Kundera … is master here, directing the action from on high, an accomplished puppeteer. But frequently the puppeteer's hands appear as he re-directs our attention to the ideas that inspire the performance, indeed away from the mere objects that impersonate them.

These first-person intrusions by the author—occasionally bits like "I have been thinking about Tomas for many years" or "But let us return to the bowler hat"—are slightly puzzling, more so when quoted out of context. But then out-of-context is really all they are. There is no context, no real world, in this novel. We are never asked to suspend our disbelief, but rather reminded to cling jealously to it. In its effort to fly in the face of traditional novel form, the book issues a challenge, a quite self-conscious one, to the validity of form. And here style mirrors content.

Validity is on the block in the novel: the validity of involvement, passionate or political, the validity of occupation, of experience, of art…. Cast in the pallid light of this perspective, the events and characters portrayed in the novel seem relegated to an existence that seems more ritual than real….

Only the pathetic heroine Tereza seems moved to genuine, unfettered emotion.

Imprisoned by a hopelessly unfailing love for Tomas, Tereza embodies commitment, in Kundera's terms the burden or "heaviness" of being. She is his one "poetic" love, which roughly translates into the one woman in whom he takes more than a merely glandular interest…. [He] cavorts like a satyr and returns at night, reeking of other women, to the bed of his one true love.

Tomas, however, is not completely unsympathetic. Something—love, the desire for a good night's sleep—impels him to follow his wife back to Prague, and this act is his undoing. He will not kick himself free of the world completely, cannot disappear like the meaningless Sabina into that voidish lightness of being…. Tomas opts for some involvement in the world, as grim as it has become; ultimately he chooses, albeit from a drastically reduced list of choices, "significance." In doing so he chooses, as well, its concomitant despair.

That such a choice need be made, and that, given the constraints imposed upon humanity in the novel, the choice amounts to very nearly an affirmation, speaks to the central image of the book; that of the essential ambiguity, the tragic paradox, that modern life poses. Not only are there no easy choices, but there are no choices without deeply painful consequences. Any response a character makes to the grim circumstances of life is undermined by the impossibility of a genuinely human resolution in a world no longer fit for simple humanity. Accordingly, the author's depiction of the struggle is complex and disturbing, a metaphor for the condition it examines.