Author: Milan Kundera
Genre: Philosophical fiction, Magical realism.
Released: 1984
"She was thinking of the days of Johann Sebastian Bach, when music was like a rose blooming on a boundless now-covered plain of silence."
A few times in your humble life, you will come across a line or paragraph whose brilliance leaps out of the page and lodges itself firmly in that area of your mind that is specially reserved for brilliance. For some people, this may be Juliet's cry, "Oh Romeo, Oh Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?", for other's it may be one of Fitzgerald's masterpieces about boats beating on. For me, Kundera's take on Bach's music profoundly stands out in it's simple vividity. If Bach's music is like a rose blooming in a immense snow-covered field of silence, then The Unbearable Lightness of Being is an oasis that appears to a weary traveler, on the brink of collapse, in an infinite desert of possibility.
The book offers a glimpse into the intellectual mind of a few well developed character's living in late 1960s Prague, at the cusp of the Soviet Invasion and dawn of communism. While the novel is not a direct critic of communism, it's comedic portrayals of communist manifesto can lead to simple implications by an educated reader such as yourself, that perhaps it isn't the most ideal ideology.
Nestling itself in the erotic/philosophical/existentialism genre of literature, the book does a great job of exploring transcendental ideals, like the weight (or lightness) of being, in relation to common human actions/desires. The first protagonist, Tomas, is an avid womanizer, who manages to fool himself that Love and Sex can be separated, and so maintains a loving relationship while secretly fielding many mistresses, with one mistress in particular, Sabina, who crosses paths in interesting and titillating ways with the lover's. But as the dire consequences of such a conviction quickly manifest in his lover, Tereza, he slowly realizes his weak dogma and discards it. It take's a special kind of human to maintain a loving relationship, in the true sense of the word Love, and while maintaining sexual relations with a throng of other women at the same time; have no ontological issues arise as a result. Certainly, no man, except maybe Hugh Heffner, could pull of such a manoeuvre prior to the year 1992 (Invention of the smartphone).
Another interesting concept challenged by the book, is the concept of eternal recurrence (the idea that the universe and its events have already occurred and will recur ad infinitum). I say challenged because for most of the novel, Tomas espouses that the opposite is true; that life only occurs but once, and hence there is no basis of comparison for one's action's with perhaps past lives that have been re-occurring over and over again.
"Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all."
A crushing proposition; existential to the point of depressing, but such is the nature of Kundera's magnus opus. He is not afraid to explore those heavy, brutal topics, and paint them with scenarios that wring true in the sympathetic reader's heart. From Love, sex, fetishes, cancer and even a whole section dedicated to shit, yes, literal, human shit, Kundera explores the innate humanism of it's character's in a way that brings out the mystical nature of being.
For those suffering through the unbearable lightness of being, I highly suggest this book, which will weigh heavy on your mind long after you read it. Memorable epitaph's, well-rounded character's and a beautiful use of simile and metaphor to convey meaning, the only shame surrounding this book, is that Milan Kundera did not win a Nobel prize for it. Enjoy!
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