Book Review: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

(Note: I would like to preface this review by saying that it’s not very complete. If I really wanted a good one, I should have written this right after reading the book. Still, I wanted to encourage people to read it, so I’ve very broadly recapped why I think people should read the book. Which I really think you should, mostly because it will be like nothing you’ve ever read. When I inevitably read this book again, I’ll be much better prepared to write an actual review. For now, this will have to do.)

Very few good things came out of the year 1984, but among them were Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” me, and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (and, according to Wikipedia and Amy Winehouse, crack as well).

I guess you could call Unbearable Lightness a novel, inasmuch as that’s exactly what it says on the cover. What it’s actually more like is a collection of the thoughts of an author that might have, at some point, led to a novel. From the beginning, the story is told as though Kundera has pulled the curtain back, revealing the stagehands and pulley system that are allowing the actors to “fly.”

That’s not to say that this is a book about flying, or plays, or even Kundera (although he is omnipresent). I don’t know that the book on the whole is about any one thing in particular, or maybe I’m just not smart enough to figure it out. However, I can tell you this – the vast majority of the vast number of things that make up this book are sublimely tantalizing. That may appear to be a strange choice of wording, but it’s the closest term I could use to describe what the book does with your mind at various, unexpected times. Kundera frequently (and I mean frequently) steps away from the story for long digressions that have nothing to do with the story, but everything to do with the human condition. (Note: I would have an example or two here, but the copy I was reading wasn’t mine, and I didn’t take any notes. After you read the first 20 pages, though, you’ll already know what I’m talking about.) It’s almost as if he had all of these brilliant thoughts lying around, filling up random notebooks, and he thought, Well, I can’t just not publish these things. I’m a genius. I guess I’ll just spread them around this book I just wrote. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense or not if people think they’re interesting. And he was right. Or maybe they had everything to do with the story. I really don’t think I’ll ever be smart enough to know for sure.

I’ll do my best to explain the premise, since that’s standard for reviews, even though I don’t know how much significance it has. The story follows four people: Tomas, a caring and thoughtful man who also happens to be a serial womanizer; his wife Tereza, an insecure and naive country girl who is tortured by Tomas’s various affairs; Tomas’s favorite mistress Sabina, an artist and a seductive sociopath in that order; and one of her extended flings, Franz, an academic who canonizes Sabina and loathes his wife and daughter. Probably the only unifying concept amongst all four that I can grasp is the most obvious one, the one that is made plain in the title. Unfortunately, that theme, that life is at once both magnificent and burdensome, is not in the least bit compelling. Unless, of course, you’re Milan Kundera. Then, you take this stale cliche and recreate its very meaning, deconstructing several other prescribed human truths that take people’s entire lives to build along the way, just for the hell of it. And if you think he’s going to end up tying everything into a little gift basket of philosophy, cohesion, rationality, and other morsels of personal comfort as a reward for investing time unspooling your entire emotional development – if you need that kind of resolution – then you probably shouldn’t read The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Or maybe you’re exactly the kind of person that should.

Like I said, Milan Kundera is smart, and I’m not. Maybe you should just ask him.