The Unbearable Lightness of Being

[scottw]

Recently, I have been discussing literature on Chat Roulette (health warning!). This book was recommended to me there. I had never heard of Milan Kundera before, or read anything quite like this novel.

I was anxious when the book opened with a brief discussion of Nietzsche's 'eternal return', as I have never studied philosophy, but once the story began I found I was quite comfortable and free to consider the book's depths at my own pace, and with the aid of the narrator's (perhaps the writer's, given the early admission that the characters are entirely fictitious) interwoven reflections on the novel's imaginary characters and their lives, thoughts and feelings.

I enjoyed the blend of regular narrative and philosophy. I considered the characters and how they viewed themselves more deeply than I think I do with more standard style novels because Kundera was always positively encouraging me to do so, and offering his own thoughts and feelings on their lives.

The writing is beautiful, the kind that makes you smile in recognition of some truth that you can recognise but could not articulate nearly as well.

I'd like to know what people think of this book, and this writer. Also, if you have read TULOB, what connection, if any, do you see to Kundera's consideration of the Czech battle with Communism. Was it just the necessary flavour of the characters' lives, or was it relevant to the philosophical debate revolving around lightness and living in truth?

[scottw]

Has anybody read this book?

[seaofmilktea]

Personally, I preferred The Joke.
Then again, I read Lightness a while ago so it might be better than I remember.

[loe]

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is a wonderful book.

It confronts the reader with the fact that you have only one life to live. There are no rehearsals before the real play.
Although this may be a trivial truth it was very nice to read about it and I liked the way in which it is dealt with in this book.

I would also recommend reading "Immortality".

[bookowskee]

I've read it a few years ago. It was Ok. Haven't read any of Kundera's books since then which means he's not on the top of my list.

[Darcy88]

I haven't read it but I've long meant to. I've always wanted to visit Prague, something about that city intrigues me. I'm big on Nietzsche. "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" also has to be one of the ultimate titles given any book all time.

[Lykren]

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is a wonderful book.

It confronts the reader with the fact that you have only one life to live. There are no rehearsals before the real play.
Although this may be a trivial truth


I haven't read the book yet (it's on my list, which means I WILL get to it), but I have to ask: how on earth is that a 'trivial' truth?

[loe]

...how on earth is that a 'trivial' truth?
I mean that it's not really unexpected news that we have only one life to live and that you can't try different ways of life before deciding for one, isn't it?

(I used "trivial" not in the meaning of something irrelevant, but as referring to completely basic knowledge.)

[Eiseabhal]

Perhaps you meant mundane or banal rather than trivial

[Xbalanque]

I read this a couple of years back and really enjoyed it. It was timed perfectly, as I had just read Nietzche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and was trying to decompress how I felt about his "Eternal Return". This book jumped directly into the subject in that first section, and then presented the characters in a way that helped me reflect more on the concept. Kundera's one of my favorite authors and I would really recommend The Book of Laughter and Forgetting if you want to gain some more perspective on Czech Communism.

[Minor spoilers here]
The way I see it dealing with existential crises and the idea of eternal return is through vastly different characters and the ways their actions affect others and themselves. It's tough as a reader to see the characters indifferently when they're behaving either amorally or immorally, especially with Thomas in all his infidelities. It's really difficult to capture it all at once, but I think Kundera does an excellent job showing characters who give an overwhelming significance to the burdens of existence, whether they treat their own lives as weightless and "free", or weighed down by convention and tethered to a social existence. At times all of the characters seemed to be oppressed by their choices no matter how free or secure they had made them feel at one moment or another.

I really liked Thomas' struggle with his Oedipus article and what it came to mean for him as the burdens of social pressure became a part of it. He wrote the article as a sincere attempt to uncover particular truths about the culture and regime at the time. He didn't write it as a polemic, but more as a type of meditation. Once it became published and that part of himself was shared with the world, he received pressure from all ends to turn it into some sort of justification for their own ideals and world-views. I can see this as Kundera trying to portray his own role in Prague during the times of persecution and repression; on the one hand he may have felt a sense of self-obligation to share his views and dissect the authoritarian aspects of the communist rule that infringed upon artistic creativity and restricted the sincerity of an artist's work. At the same time there must have been tremendous pressure from activists and "dissenters" that pushed notions of a social responsibility on artists to speak out against tyranny (Like the dissident editor and his son pressure him to sign a petition denouncing the regime's treatment of political prisoners). I didn't get the feeling that Kundera was hostile towards the idea of social responsibility alone, but more so towards the publishers and journals who only valued such a personal work in its social criticism because it reinforced their own paradigms in a political sense. Thomas wrote the article because of his own disgust with the Communists unwillingness to admit their mistakes and continue to let nationalist propaganda create a skewed lie-based reality for Czechs. Once the work reached the minds of the public it became a type of polemic that brought on pressure from the bureaucracy, the dissidents, and even those who kept their heads in the sand - they detested Thomas because of the sense of moral superiority they projected onto him for refusing to sign over the rights of his work to the government.

Eventually, instead of buying into any of the above he becomes an obscure window-washer who indulges in a type of hedonism by having sex with hundreds of clients. Instead of playing the "game" that others treat as an obligation he withdraws into "lightness" but he's never really completely free of the burdens that felt externally forced from his son and the editor. He feels that maybe he should have signed the petition because that in itself was something he had agreed with, but at the same time he didn't think it to be reasonable in that the "cause" stood no real chance at having a significant impact on the power structure. I really liked the "Grand March" chapter in how it portrayed the protest in its absurdity rather than being romanticized. I think the point with this whole dilemma was the confusion that surrounds a cause that may be sincere in theory, but that people always end up botching through their own seemingly natural flaws. The ideals of the movement seemed to be reasonable and beneficial to the Czechs, but the masses of people who were to execute them will never be effective once they collectively embrace the ideal - somewhat parallel to the Communists they were opposed to.

FYI, my memory is really foggy of this novel so I apologize for any inconsistencies or erroneous statements.

[JBI]

I didn't care for it - it seems almost too preachy in terms of trying to be philosophical while dealing with the mundane, and trying to imbue itself with a sort of deep meaning that to me felt forced. Perhaps this is just a personal view, I thought it had some interesting parts, but overall felt a little bit too "written" for me, in the sense that it was almost too polishy for me, in its use of philosophical tidbits mixed into the narrative voice.

[loe]

Perhaps you meant mundane or banal rather than trivial
Thank you very much! You are right.