Leap into the Void
[In the following review, Miller asserts that The Unbearable Lightness of Being “is clearly meant to be the capstone of Kundera's career to date.”]
With each new book, Milan Kundera, the virtuoso Czech novelist exiled in Paris, has enlarged and embellished his bleak vision of man's fate. Like a dour toy designer lavishing his attention on an intricately mirrored kaleidoscope, he has devised delightful new forms and fragments that expand the play of light and darkness. After the somber realism of The Joke (1969) and the rococo tragicomedy of The Farewell Party (1976), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980) came as a revelation—a scintillating collage comprised of parables, autobiographical scraps and blunt scenes of sexual conquest and submission. It had the air of a sublime improvisation—impromptu, serendipitous, inspired.
Kundera's new book evokes a weightier musical analogy: Beethoven's last string quartets. A fantasia on nihilism, it is clearly meant to be the capstone of Kundera's career to date. His starting point is the philosophy of Nietzsche and his own conviction that modern man has proved unfit to master nature or history or himself. “If God is dead,” Kundera has said, “and if man is unable to replace Him, life seems to lose its substance, its weight. We feel ‘the unbearable lightness of being.’”
The longest and best parts of the book concern Tomas and Tereza, two Czech lovers. He is a Prague doctor and philanderer, jealous of his freedom, impulsive in his actions. She is devoted and decent, a small-town girl in love with animals and the solitude of the countryside. Kundera imagines Tomas “standing at the window of his flat and looking across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do.” Tereza is plagued by nightmares: “Each time you knocked at [my] grave … I came out. My eyes were full of dirt. You'd say, ‘How can you see?’ and try to wipe the dirt from my eyes. And I'd say, ‘I can't see anyway. I have holes instead of eyes.’”
After a brief courtship, they are married, but Tomas proves inconstant. His hesitation between the roles of Don Juan and Tristan recalls Kierkegaard's “Either/Or.” Unable to make Kierkegaard's “leap of faith,” Tomas struggles to choose between the lighthearted, “esthetic” path of libertinism (his favorite paramour is a rootless painter) and the burdensome, “ethical” path of authentic love and loyalty to Tereza. At the heart of the book is the elaboration of this dilemma how to hold fast to a passion or a principle in the face of powerful competing impulses and paralyzing doubt. As usual, Kundera is a very visible author. He frequently comments on his characters and interrupts the narrative with short essays on kitsch, man's relationship to animals, even a “theodicy” of excrement. Some of his metaphysical aphorisms seem lifeless. It would be absurd, though, to fault Kundera's new work for being “too philosophical,” since it is his curiosity about “the questions with no answers” that spurs his special genius. As The Unbearable Lightness of Being confirms, Kundera has a remarkable ability to evoke and explore abstract concepts through the repetition of words (like “vertigo”) and the creation of disturbing images. The unforgettable climax of the book, which revolves, improbably enough, around the death of a dog, offers perhaps the clearest evidence yet that Kundera has raised the novel of ideas to a new level of dreamlike lyricism and emotional intensity.
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