About a year ago or so, an acquaintance of mine gave me this book to read. She lauded the novel and said that it resonated with her and that she wanted me to read it, for one reason or another. This isn't significant in and of itself, but I can't help but reflect on that exchange after finishing the book. People have admired this novel for decades since its publication in 1982, but I can't help but be confused by this high acclaim. This isn't to say that it's poorly written; if anything, translator Michael Henry Heim does a beautiful job of interpreting Milan Kundera's prose from the original Czech. The issue lies in the purpose of Kundera's novel: not to craft a story in which characters come to life and to which the readers become attached all the while developing a plot that carries the theme, but rather to gather up his philosophical musings in one space. You can see it in the very title. It is a story about a philosophical truth (at least, to Kundera); it is a story not of life but of "being," the difference being that the former inherently and inevitably involves vicissitudes and difficulties, trials and tribulations, while the latter is flat and stale: I exist, but so does a rock. Only a man lives. This isn't a novel about men.
But people, including, most likely, Kundera, will tell you that it is. Ostensibly, it is a novel about four individuals, each romantically involved with another, even if indirectly. Tomas and Tereza are the main couple. Tomas is a Czech surgeon who, after an unfortunate article in which he relates Czech Communists to Oedipus, loses his esteemed medical position and ends up as a window-washer, among other things. His wife and only love, Tereza, acts as the damsel in distress, a frail lover who constantly frets about her husband's late-night activities. And rightfully so: Tomas is an unapologetic womanizer, one who believes that Love and Sex are entirely separate things. The other two characters are Sabina, Tomas' favorite lover and a painter, and Franz, a rather forgettable scholar who falls in love with Sabina. And there you have it: four lives, intertwined by sex and love. Tomas loves Tereza but sleeps with Sabina; Franz loves Sabina; Sabina goes off and paints things; Tereza bites her fingernails.
Like I've said, it isn't a novel about men or women. Indeed, these characters seem little more than vehicles for Kundera's philosophical musings. As a result, they are stripped of anything a reader can relate to. In any other novel, there would linger some mystery around the actions of characters. I would wonder why Tereza stays with Tomas, even when he is unfaithful to her. By doing so, I would infuse her with an air of reality. People and their actions can be inscrutable, and if a character is similarly unyielding to explanation, they appear three-dimensional and plastic, rather than flat. But Kundera relieves me of the burden of thinking. He simply states the reasons why characters do things: Tereza stays with Tomas because she loves him. In a very Eastern European fashion, Milan Kundera "tells," rather than "shows." As a result, I do no work on my part to understand these characters. In the end, they simply feel airy and two-dimensional. Even the structure of the prose is not conducive to character development: "chapters" are perhaps a page or two in length--small vignettes that punctuate the text but do nothing to pace it. The function of the chapter is to chop up the story, not to establish its skeleton.
It is a novel that falls underneath the weight of its own message. The recurring and central theme is that of Eternal Return:
The idea is that because a thing occurs once, it has no weight: "If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness." That's nice and all, but the opposite argument is equally valid, isn't it? If my one action is unique, never to recur, doesn't it take on all the significance of the world? Kundera asks: "What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?" I ask: are those two really the only options? Must we decide between them? Then there arises the question of sentience: would we be aware of Eternal Return as it played out? If not, then how could we ever differentiate between Eternal Return and its absence? Our actions would then become simultaneously light and heavy. Correct me if I'm wrong, of course; it simply appears to me that Kundera's philosophy and the central theme of this piece is specious at best. Perhaps a familiarity of Nietzsche's theories would have helped. If that's the case, then maybe Kundera could have helped me out a bit more. Instead, his thoughts simply don't seem well thought out.
This is not to say that the book is without its virtues. There are certain ideas that Kundera captures beautifully, such as the manner in which people view their lives. In fact, it is something I truly agree with it, and I think Kundera did a fantastic job of expressing this curious phenomenon:
The excerpt makes more sense in context, and perhaps my paraphrasing dulls a bit of the majesty, but the thought is as beautiful as it is eloquently delivered: we fashion our lives around motifs, ones that leap out to us in ways that only make sense to us. For example, if I meet a woman underneath a canopy of cherry trees, this incident will seem all the more significant if cherry trees have played an important role in my life. I'm sure everyone can relate to this idea. Myself, I constantly see motifs play out in my life. This might just be my bias as a writer, though.
Other thoughts are similarly beautiful. Tomas, despite his infuriating womanizing ways, arrives at a startling conclusion: "Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)." I'm sure the cynics out there will disagree, but I liked this thought for what it was. There certainly is a distinction between sex and love, and any reasonable adults out there in the audience should agree with this. It was Tomas' connection between Love and Shared Sleep that really impressed me. God knows I'm not willing to share a bed with someone unless I really care for her. Moreover: the ending was beautifully done, and I won't spoil it for those of you interested in reading it.
Ultimately, The Unbearable Lightness of Being can be aesthetically pleasing, but I found its intellectual premise lacking weight, as it were. It is by no means awful, but I don't understand those who extol its virtues. The curious thing, of course, is that because it is a book, you can open its pages again and again: its characters are trapped in their own Eternal Return. I'm sure this did not escape the attention of Milan Kundera. It's ironic, then: the novel of lightness is plagued by the heaviest of burdens. Was its own philosophy too much for the novel to bear? How does this affect the purpose of the novel, and its message? Franz realizes, at one point: "...that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand." By the last page, I could not help but feel similarly about the novel.
But people, including, most likely, Kundera, will tell you that it is. Ostensibly, it is a novel about four individuals, each romantically involved with another, even if indirectly. Tomas and Tereza are the main couple. Tomas is a Czech surgeon who, after an unfortunate article in which he relates Czech Communists to Oedipus, loses his esteemed medical position and ends up as a window-washer, among other things. His wife and only love, Tereza, acts as the damsel in distress, a frail lover who constantly frets about her husband's late-night activities. And rightfully so: Tomas is an unapologetic womanizer, one who believes that Love and Sex are entirely separate things. The other two characters are Sabina, Tomas' favorite lover and a painter, and Franz, a rather forgettable scholar who falls in love with Sabina. And there you have it: four lives, intertwined by sex and love. Tomas loves Tereza but sleeps with Sabina; Franz loves Sabina; Sabina goes off and paints things; Tereza bites her fingernails.
Like I've said, it isn't a novel about men or women. Indeed, these characters seem little more than vehicles for Kundera's philosophical musings. As a result, they are stripped of anything a reader can relate to. In any other novel, there would linger some mystery around the actions of characters. I would wonder why Tereza stays with Tomas, even when he is unfaithful to her. By doing so, I would infuse her with an air of reality. People and their actions can be inscrutable, and if a character is similarly unyielding to explanation, they appear three-dimensional and plastic, rather than flat. But Kundera relieves me of the burden of thinking. He simply states the reasons why characters do things: Tereza stays with Tomas because she loves him. In a very Eastern European fashion, Milan Kundera "tells," rather than "shows." As a result, I do no work on my part to understand these characters. In the end, they simply feel airy and two-dimensional. Even the structure of the prose is not conducive to character development: "chapters" are perhaps a page or two in length--small vignettes that punctuate the text but do nothing to pace it. The function of the chapter is to chop up the story, not to establish its skeleton.
It is a novel that falls underneath the weight of its own message. The recurring and central theme is that of Eternal Return:
"Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing. We need take no more note of it than of a war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment."
The idea is that because a thing occurs once, it has no weight: "If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness." That's nice and all, but the opposite argument is equally valid, isn't it? If my one action is unique, never to recur, doesn't it take on all the significance of the world? Kundera asks: "What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?" I ask: are those two really the only options? Must we decide between them? Then there arises the question of sentience: would we be aware of Eternal Return as it played out? If not, then how could we ever differentiate between Eternal Return and its absence? Our actions would then become simultaneously light and heavy. Correct me if I'm wrong, of course; it simply appears to me that Kundera's philosophy and the central theme of this piece is specious at best. Perhaps a familiarity of Nietzsche's theories would have helped. If that's the case, then maybe Kundera could have helped me out a bit more. Instead, his thoughts simply don't seem well thought out.
This is not to say that the book is without its virtues. There are certain ideas that Kundera captures beautifully, such as the manner in which people view their lives. In fact, it is something I truly agree with it, and I think Kundera did a fantastic job of expressing this curious phenomenon:
"This symmetrical composition--the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end--might seem quite 'novelistic' to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as 'fictive,' 'fabricated,' and 'untrue to life' into the word 'novelistic.' Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.
"They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence...into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life....
"It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences...but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."
The excerpt makes more sense in context, and perhaps my paraphrasing dulls a bit of the majesty, but the thought is as beautiful as it is eloquently delivered: we fashion our lives around motifs, ones that leap out to us in ways that only make sense to us. For example, if I meet a woman underneath a canopy of cherry trees, this incident will seem all the more significant if cherry trees have played an important role in my life. I'm sure everyone can relate to this idea. Myself, I constantly see motifs play out in my life. This might just be my bias as a writer, though.
Other thoughts are similarly beautiful. Tomas, despite his infuriating womanizing ways, arrives at a startling conclusion: "Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)." I'm sure the cynics out there will disagree, but I liked this thought for what it was. There certainly is a distinction between sex and love, and any reasonable adults out there in the audience should agree with this. It was Tomas' connection between Love and Shared Sleep that really impressed me. God knows I'm not willing to share a bed with someone unless I really care for her. Moreover: the ending was beautifully done, and I won't spoil it for those of you interested in reading it.
Ultimately, The Unbearable Lightness of Being can be aesthetically pleasing, but I found its intellectual premise lacking weight, as it were. It is by no means awful, but I don't understand those who extol its virtues. The curious thing, of course, is that because it is a book, you can open its pages again and again: its characters are trapped in their own Eternal Return. I'm sure this did not escape the attention of Milan Kundera. It's ironic, then: the novel of lightness is plagued by the heaviest of burdens. Was its own philosophy too much for the novel to bear? How does this affect the purpose of the novel, and its message? Franz realizes, at one point: "...that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand." By the last page, I could not help but feel similarly about the novel.
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