Genre: Novel
Sub-genre: -A Novel of Ideas
Nationality: - Czech
Time Period: 20th Century // Contemporary
First and Last Read: Spring 1996 // Spring 2000
Rated: - A+
Use: The Novel ENG 353 and Masterpieces of World Literature
Location: - Dr. Rearick's Office
Scripture that comes to mind:
http://www.georgetown.edu/irvinemj/english016/kundera/kundera.html
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Date: April 2,
1984, Monday, Late City Final Edition Section C;
Page 20, Column
4; Cultural Desk
Byline: By Michiko
Kakutani
Lead: THE UNBEARABLE
LIGHTNESS OF BEING. By Milan
Kundera. 314
pages. Harper & Row. $15.95.
WITH his last
novel, ''The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,'' the
Czechoslovak
writer Milan Kundera established himself as one
of the most
original and important new voices in contemporary
fiction. Such
earlier works as ''The Farewell Party,'' a sort of
updated Restoration
sex farce set in an Eastern European spa, and
''The Joke,''
a dark parable about life and love in Prague, had
hinted at his
talents as an ironist. And ''Laughter and Forgetting''
both confirmed
his mastery of that Kafkaesque skill and
demonstrated
his ambition - and capacity - to remake the novel as
an expansive
forum for philosophical and political ideas.
Text:
Like ''Laughter
and Forgetting,'' Mr. Kundera's new novel uses a
seven-part narrative
to work musical variations on the themes of
history and
desire. And like ''Laughter and Forgetting,'' it purveys
a deeply subversive
portrait of Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia,
while at the
same time dazzling the reader with the playful
possibilities
of fiction.
The earlier book,
however, was essentially a series of separate
tales, held
together by recurrent motifs, whereas ''The
Unbearable Lightness
of Being'' is a fairly straightforward inquiry
into the intertwined
fates of two pairs of lovers. The fact that it
aspires to be
a more conventional novel accounts for both its
virtues and
its flaws. If ''Lightness'' demonstrates a new capacity,
on Mr. Kundera's
part, to create sympathetic characters and
sustain a lyrical
story, the increased formality of its narrative
design also
tends to throw a harsher light on his penchant for
philosophical
digression.
The utopian impulse
shared by ideologues of the right and left;
the possibility
of a ''planet, where we would all be born a third
time''; the
unqualified love that animals bear for their masters -
such notions
tend to be either familiar or downright silly.
''Perhaps,''
reads one passage, ''a man hitched to the cart of a
Martian or roasted
on the spit by inhabitants of the Milky Way
will recall
the veal cutlet he used to slice on his dinner plate and
apologize (belatedly!)
to the cow.''
Presumably Mr.
Kundera has allowed his narrator to ramble on
like this in
order to infuse his characters' stories with added
significance,
but such efforts are both abortive and unnecessary.
Drawn with the
brisk outlines and strong colors of a Bonnard
pastel, his
characters already possess the resonance of figures in
a fable. In
''Laughter and Forgetting,'' individuals were
preoccupied
with finding a balance between two visions of the
world - one
reflecting perfect order and reason; the other, total
randomness and
absurdity. In ''Lightness,'' they search for a
similar balance
between commitment and freedom. The former
leads to entrapment,
in terms of both personal relationships and
political ideology;
the latter, to rootlessness and the loss of
identity. How
each of the four main characters deals with this
dialectic forms
the broad story line of the novel.
The lovely Tereza,
who is unspeakably jealous of her husband
Tomas's mistresses,
''knew that she had become a burden to him:
she took things
too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy,
and failed to
grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of
physical love.''
Tomas, on his part, wants to stop hurting Tereza,
but finds that
his affairs give him a way of dealing with her
despotic love.
Sabina, his favorite mistress, shares his craving for
escape; she
has lived her life as a succession of betrayals - of
parents, of
country and of friends. Her lover, Franz, does not
understand her
need to be ''light'' and free; he worships her with
the same uncompromising
fervor that makes him so devoted to
the revolutionary
cause.
Politics, of
course, plays an enormous role in Mr. Kundera's
books, and by
the end of ''Lightness,'' the reader has a sense of
the anger and
despair that Czechoslovaks felt in the wake of the
Soviet invasion
of 1968, the anomie that pervades emigre life and
the terrible
hypocrisy that infects every level of life in a
totalitarian
society. For Mr. Kundera's characters, nothing -
neither language,
nor love - escapes the eclipsing shadow of the
social situation.
Even sex - which, in the author's earlier fiction,
represented
an expression of unaccommodated and therefore
subversive passion
- becomes, here, another theater for deceit
and power plays.
Mr. Kundera,
however, is concerned not only with the ways in
which politics
affects personal relationships - and vice versa - but
also with the
underlying psychological mechanisms that shape
both our private
and public lives. As he sees it, the impulse that
makes Sabina
so wary of settling down with one man is the same
one that makes
her so skeptical of political orthodoxy; the
impulse that
makes Franz so eager for a perfect liaison is the
same one that
sends him marching off to help the people of
Cambodia.
Though his narrator,
at times, passes judgments on the actions
and beliefs
of the other characters, Mr. Kundera, himself, posits
no answers or
positions. For him, Franz is no more misguided
than Sabina;
Sabina, no more culpable than Franz. In this,
''Lightness''
- whatever its shortcomings - demands to be judged
not as a work
of political or ''dissident'' literature, but as a work
of art.
A Reader's Guide to The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Found on HaperCollins Perennial Classics Page located at
http://www.perennialclassics.com/readers/kundera2.htm
Discussion Topics
What kinds of being carry the attribute of lightness? How is the "lightness
of being" of the novel's title presented? In what ways is it "unbearable"?
What is the difference between "the sweet lightness of being" that Tomas
enjoys in Zurich, after Tereza's return to Prague, and "the unbearable
lightness of being"?
How does Nietzsche's myth of eternal return, with which Kundera opens
his book, function in the novel? What does Kundera mean when he refers
to "the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on
the nonexistence of return"? How does what he calls the unbearable burden
of eternal return contrast with the "splendid lightness" of our daily lives?
How would you describe the three central relationships of the novel--Tereza
and Tomas, Tomas and Sabina, Sabina and Franz? How do they embody Kundera's
primary concerns and themes?
In what ways does Kundera explore what he calls "the irreconcilable
duality of body and soul, that fundamental human experience." In what ways
does he show this duality to be fundamental?
Both Tereza and Tomas repeatedly think of the series of fortuitous events
that brought them together. What is the rule of fortuity, chance, and coincidence
in their lives and the lives of others? What does Kundera mean when he
writes, "Chance and chance alone has a message for us"?
In what ways may Sabina's description of her dual-level paintings--"On
the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth"--apply
to every aspect of the characters' lives and relationships?
What meanings and importance do each of the main characters ascribe
to fidelity and betrayal? In what instances, for each character, do fidelity
and betrayal have either positive or negative qualities?
Kundera insists that "the criminal regimes were made not by criminals
but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise."
What visions or versions of paradise are presented in the novel? By whom?
How does each vision/version of paradise affect the lives of its enthusiasts
and the lives of others?
Plot Summary
Tereza and Tomas, Tomas and Sabina, Sabina and Franz, Franz and
Marie-Claude--four people, four relationships. Milan Kundera's masterful novel,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), tells the interlocking stories of
these four relationships, with a primary focus on Tomas, a man torn between
his love for Tereza, his wife, and his incorrigible "erotic adventures,"
particularly his long-time affair with the internationally noted painter,
Sabina.
The world of Kundera's novel is one in which lives are shaped by irrevocable
choices and fortuitous events. It is a world in which, because everything occurs
only once and then disappears into the past, existence seems to lose its
substance and weight. Coping with both the consequences of their own
actions and desires and the intruding demands of society and the state,
Kundera's characters struggle to construct lives of individual value and lasting
meaning.
A novel of ideas, a provocative look at the ways in which history impinges on
individual lives, and a meditation on personal identity, The Unbearable
Lightness of Being examines the imperfect possibilities of adult love and the
ways in which free choice and necessity shape our lives. "What then shall we
choose?" Kundera asks at the beginning of his novel. "Weight or lightness?"
This international bestseller is his attempt to answer that question. And the
answer is hinted at in the novel's final scene, in which Tomas and Tereza find
themselves in a small country hotel after a rare evening of dancing. When
Tomas turns on the light in their room, "a large nocturnal butterfly" rises from
the bedside lamp and circles the room in which they are alone with their
happiness and their sadness.
This page last updated on
Wednesday, May 3, 2000