The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

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SOURCE: “All Booked,” in New York, July 1-8, 1985, pp. 130-32.

[In the following review, Koenig offers praise for The Unbearable Lightness of Being.]

Love looms large in summer reading, along with angry gods, Hollywood parties, and nervous breakdowns. Many interesting times await you between the covers of paperback books, first published last year and longer ago.

At once clever and somber, joyous and harrowing, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is Milan Kundera's profoundly touching novel about love and freedom. The liberty in question is both personal and political. Tomas, a Prague surgeon, makes love to a waitress who yearns for “something higher,” lets her move into his flat, and, finally, “to assuage Tereza's sufferings he married her.” Though Tereza's sufferings are caused by Tomas's infidelities, he will not give up his mistresses; all he can offer his wife is the right to be jealous and a warm embrace when she wakes, trembling, from her nightmares. But after Tomas runs afoul of the Communist regime and has to become a window washer, his attitudes toward sex and constancy take a new turn. Meanwhile, Sabina, one of Tomas's former mistresses, leaves Prague, where her paintings are thought to be subversive, and takes up with Franz, a Swiss academic whose rapacious wife regards him as one more possession in her overstuffed living room. Kundera traces the follies and ecstasies of these lovers with immense intelligence and tenderness. When Tomas recalls, uneasily, that “his acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six improbable fortuities,” the author interposes, “Necessity knows no magic formulae—they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulder.” And when Sabina shrinks from a man proclaiming his benevolence, Kundera puts in, “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!” The translation, by Michael Henry Heim, is faultless.

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Kundera's Quartet (On The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

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