[In the following review, Hawtree offers a favorable assessment of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.]

Behind this most off-putting of titles there is a novel that, problematic and even irritating as its elliptical structure might momentarily be, exerts a curious fascination. Fitted together out of sequence by an ingenious, self-conscious writer whose sense of humour saves him from the passé indulgences of modernism, The Unbearable Lightness of Being contains characters of considerably more interest than have previously appeared in Kundera's fiction. At first, it seems that they will become submerged beneath a bale of homespun philosophy that, using people as ciphers to play out an elaborate game, recalls the worst excesses of the French structuralists. The opening pages turn around the contrast between things as they appear at the time and from a later perspective. ‘There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.’ This sense of the past, of continuity—heaviness—is seen as a positive foil to the fleeting sensations and frivolity—lightness—which form contemporary existence. It is between these twin poles of behaviour and attitude that the drama of the novel in its private and public sides is acted out. Such an idea surfaced five years ago in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. ‘In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.’

Milan Kundera's recurrent posing of the dilemmas surrounding private faces in public places is discussed in an interview with Ian McEwan printed in the latest issue of Granta. Too much exposition can be a dangerous thing, the characters becoming subsidiary to ideas and as a result mere pieces in the pattern of analogue and allusion. For all the exuberance of its comic situation, The Farewell Party is little more than a game that involves various types coping with a quandary, and the stories in Laughable Loves rehearse similar themes and settings, in particular the sexual one with which Mr. Kundera appears to be obsessed, without creating any characters that remain in the mind. Even The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which as one reads it appears a dizzyingly intelligent comedy, lingers more as brilliant sleight of hand. One often has the impression that when faced by an obvious battery of ideas many reviewers, for fear of looking stupid, automatically reach out for such phrases as ‘intellectual treat’ and those clumps of three commendatory adjectives which are not any substitute for real thinking.

Although the opening scenes appear a long-winded way of suggesting the sense of dislocation which has more than ever characterised Czech life since 1968, the novel gradually, absorbingly, takes shape as the characters are summoned from the author's mind. ‘I have been thinking about Tomas for many years. But only in the light of these reflections did I see him clearly.’ A pattern emerges, and around his familiar subjects of infidelity, sexual agony, political upheaval and vicious persecution, Mr Kundera builds a structure which, seemingly random but in fact carefully ordered, turns on itself to become a self-referential whole that manages not to alienate the reader. However wary one might have been of such authorial intrusions and homilies, it is soon impossible to imagine the novel without them. If the story were to be cast in a linear form, it could easily seem just another saga of misfortune and hardship at the hands of callous authority—Mr Kundera has been at some pains to reject the easy tag of ‘dissident novelist'. Its structure is not the gratuitous one of, say, Eyeless in Gaza.

We are told a third of the way through that by the end Tomas, a doctor, and his second wife, Tereza, will have died in a car-crash after an evening away from their work on a collective farm. In a letter from the long-lost son by Tomas's first, brief marriage, the news reaches Tomas's former mistress, an artist called Sabina, whose exile has taken her from Geneva to Paris (and eventually America) to escape marriage from Franz who has at last left his wife. This suggests something of the complex relations between the four main characters which were heightened by the Russian invasion and reluctant escape; the mental processes—the contradictions and puzzles—that cause them to behave as they do, apart from any public considerations, are made endlessly interesting; three readings do not yield all that one senses is in it. (The blurb-writer has gone onto automatic pilot and said it ‘embraces, it seems, all aspects of human existence’) Even the dreams—so often the death-blow for fiction—that torment Tereza add convincingly to the whole. From such extraordinary sentences as ‘toilets in modern water closets rise up from the floor like white water lilies’ to disquisitions on Beethoven, the book could have easily become a hideously pseudish con-trick, but everything does take its place. Equally, the death of their dog Karenin (in fact a bitch) could have had all the mawkishness of sentimental fiction or Elvis Presley's ‘Old Shep'. It is possible to weep here without shame.

Throughout the novel, all feelings are heightened by the reader's being allowed without difficulty to view them from so many angles. Impelled, as we know, to follow Tereza back to occupied Prague from Zurich, Tomas finds that a light article he had published in that heady period before the invasion has resurfaced with all the consequences, at the hands of humourless government, that befell the writer of the frivolous postcard in The Joke. As the translator punningly has it, Tomas ‘had descended voluntarily to the lowest rung of the social ladder', which in his case means becoming a window-cleaner. The long section to which the novel has, one realises, been moving revolves around the paradox that although such a life has been forced on them it can be enjoyable. ‘It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom. As long as people lived in the country, in nature, surrounded by domestic animals, in the bosom of regularly recurring seasons, they retained a glimmer of that paradisiac idyll.’ The farm chairman who dotes on his pet pig, Mefisto, could in his way have lived at Blandings Castle. Too complex a work to take simple refuge in pastoral idyll, The Unbearable Lightness of Being none the less shows that such a life is weightier than that which leads Franz to join a junket to protest at the Cambodian border where, ironically enough, he meets his own death. More than ever before, I am impatient to see what Milan Kundera will write next. Meanwhile Michael Heim, whose elegant translations have a life of their own despite an occasional Americanism (‘rest room’ demands a category of Non-U all to itself), should be urged to prepare Life Is Elsewhere which cannot be found in London either in English or French. Sadly, this volume has been produced somewhat perfunctorily.