Fiction in Review
[In the following review, Howard describes The Unbearable Lightness of Being as a “superb novel, an important work of fiction.”]
In the first sentence of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera presents us with Nietzsche's “mad myth” of eternal return, the heaviness of responsibility that lies on us if history, personal and public, recurs ad infinitum. This idea is opposed to the transitory nature of life as we experience it, which reduces responsibility: “For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
This superb novel, an important work of fiction, is launched with theory, but fear not—whoever the narrator may be, he's an entertaining fellow, sophisticated, professional, very European, not daunted by large issues. Following this dazzling introduction to his mind, he moves easily to this story: “I have been thinking about Tomas for many years. But only in the light of these reflections did I see him clearly. I saw him standing at the window of his flat and looking across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do.” So after the grand overture, we turn simply to a character, an indecisive one at that, but in the light of these reflections. And we turn to plot: Tomas, against his better judgment, lends himself to entrapment, lets Tereza, a pretty waitress, weight his life with her presence. Tomas, a doctor and a compulsive womanizer, is a charming fellow who has decided firmly in favor of no commitments. His mistress, Sabina, something of a kindred spirit—and so on, through the arrangement of these lives. The indecision and the inquiries continue:
But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life: Was it simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it?
Was it better to be with Tereza or to remain alone? There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the last rehearsal for life is life itself?
But what are we considering? It might well be a soap opera: attractive for afflicted with a case of Don Juanism, homey Tereza: Sabina, a successful painter whose opposition to permanence may amount to no more than lightweight Bohemianism. Something is awry. It is just plain funny, our professional narrator examining these trivial matters under the full light of his monumental questions. Naturally, Tomas and his plot become absurd.
In an interview, published in the New York Review of Books, “Novel against the World,” Kundera speaks of the supposed death of the novel:
I've heard people compare the history of the novel to a seam of coal long since exhausted. But for me, it's more like a mausoleum of missed opportunities and of misunderstood challenges. …
Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Diderot's Jacques le fataliste are for me the two greatest novelistic works of the eighteenth century. The two novels are playful on a grandiose scale and reach pinnacles of unseriousness never scaled before, or since.
Kundera takes up the challenge. He lives in exile, but he is a citizen of the European novel. The opening section of The Unbearable Lightness of Being is intentionally unserious, distracted with its games. Even the Russian occupation, which changes lives irrevocably, is kept light, easy, personal in the first telling:
He made several phone calls to Geneva. A show of Sabina's work had opened there by chance a week after the Russian invasion, and in a wave of sympathy for her tiny country, Geneva's patrons of the arts bought up all her paintings.
“Thanks to the Russians, I'm a rich woman,” she said, laughing into the telephone.
Life as usual. But the fact of the matter is that Tomas's life is constricted by public events and changes of scene. He and Tereza accumulate the history of their time and a history together. Their story gains significance as they do. “Every writer,” Kundera has said, “always wants to speak of essentials. Each book is a response to the question: what is essential? And suddenly, in exile, the great geographical distance permits a better view of the essentials. In one stroke, you see the general in the particular.” Tomas takes a job in Switzerland, but returns to Prague following Tereza—the stone, the draw, the heavy—who cannot live out of her context. She also lives in pain due to his need for other women, his dedication to lightness Sabina floats free around Europe, to America, free of caring: it is a problematic freedom that may prove sanitary, lifeless. She may be as girlish as Tereza.
Kundera's novel is about the agony of exile; the choice which is not choice; the return which is nearly unendurable, probably suicidal. The lives considered are no longer theoretical. Tomas and Tereza, even Sabina, have past histories, just like the people in nineteenth-century novels of the quotidian. Kundera does not love realistic paraphernalia and ordinary chronology, but uses it when he chooses in this novel to great effect. His own play, his ingenuity never diminishes. The Unbearable Lightness of Being opens out, or relaxes, into the story of Tomas, stripped of his profession, sent with Tereza into further exile on a collective farm. He is weighted once and for all with his marriage and a narrow domesticity. Sabina is doomed to an unsettled, touristy life. As the novel takes hold of the narrator, he becomes urgent, fully engaged—no longer the casual theorist, he is a presence to reckon with. His little essays and reflections are now deeply felt. The fiction is fed by his ideas on censorship, on émigré culture, but most perfectly by his beautiful obsession with language. Language, after all, is what the exiled writer is denied, a free possession of his language, and this novel makes the heartbreak of that loss clear. The definition of words, the failure of communication, appear again and again and become central to the fiction. “Compassion” (the word) and “kitsch” (the expression) are set up in brilliant passages which become as active within the novel as incident or setting may be in more traditional stories. We do not know what it is to be cut off from the street use or the intellectual discipline of our language, or to write knowing that our words are to be given up, mostly and always, to the translator. Nabokov knew this and carried on an extravagant love affair with his mother tongue. In Kundera's narrator we now have a passionate etymologist and storyteller whose initial academic questions seem as much a part of the past as Tomas's philandering and, sad to say, his career as a surgeon. Our commentator is weighted with his characters, invested in their stories, and our continuing interest in his voice depends on them. The political factor, recent Czech history, is his material, as it is their material—and it is inescapable. So is his language, which binds them all. Choices are diminished, confined to Tomas's and Tereza's personal life. In the final section, the love of animals is used as a displacement for human emotion. (That is the kind of invention which Kundera comes up with effortlessly throughout this work.) To indulge feelings for a dog, a pig, a cow in an impoverished atmosphere has dignity; it recalls a less limited time. The deathwatch and burial of Karenin, Tereza's dog, is incredibly moving: it is the longest story within the novel, ever so much more detailed and lovingly written than Tomas's and Tereza's own demise.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the most rewarding new novel I've read in years. It has been reviewed with a confused reverence, even a peevishness because, with its stunning structure, it does not declare itself: it is not heavy, not is it light. “Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.” There are no comforting answers to the “mad myth,” but Kundera makes us feel that his narrative is one way to survive hard questions, and his novel is one hell of a gloss.
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