Rating: 
Summary: not for everyone, but I liked it
Review: I had no idea what I was getting into when I bought this book. But it turned out that I enjoyed it, and although it was more tedious to read towards the end, I would recommend it to anyone who can speed read.To me this book was written as one incredibly long train of thought. The train itself breaks off into other smaller trains of thought, but it always goes back to the principle story: that of Tomas and Tereza. While Kundera may turn off the reader who doesn't enjoy straight story-telling, he does tell a story here. It's not just a book of random musings and incoherent philosophizing. That said, the stories of "Unbearable.."'s characters are simple enough. Tomas is a philanderer, torn between his lifestyle and his love for Tereza, who kind of fell into his life by chance. Tereza is his wife, who is tortured by his infidelity but cannot leave him. Other more minor characters include Sabina, a mistress of Tomas, and Franz, another married lover of Sabina. These four characters are Kundera's chosen examples of the human experience. He reveals their inner desires and motives, and otherwise tells their psychological stories along with their real-life stories. They each have "issues", as does everyone in this world. But it's interesting how their personal philosophies, having been shaped by both their human experience and their intrinsic individuality, are so different from each other's. This in return shapes the experiences they have with each other. Tereza and Tomas lived for so long together, yet they never really thought alike. And because of this, they lived totally separate lives. That, in full, is my take on the book. Kundera presents many other theories on the human experience, and I found them all interesting, but the one element that I found carried the book through was the variance in the characters' personal (as in mental, emotional, and psychological) life experience. This variance made a whole world of difference, because what is life, outside how we perceive it? The real-life stories are also interesting, but I think they are meant to be in the background. The main story is mental, it's in their reactions to life, which drives their future actions. I say this because their lives end quite insignificantly, as though they might as well not have lived--a phrase in the book proves this "What happens but once might as well not have happened at all." And yes, if our lives are perceived this way, we might as well rule them out as insignificant. Our lives can be taken so lightly that is in unbearable--the unbearable lightness of being. But Kundera makes this point in the beginning: his characters are merely that. Characters. He uses them to illustrate his theories on the human experience. So is this book a negative commentary on life's insignificance? Is Kundera trying to tell us that life means nothing? I doubt that. I think viewed from the outside, our lives might seem like they mean nothing. But to each of us, our life is colored and perceived by what we bring to it: by our history, our philosophy, our dreams. Life is a personal experience, and if it means nothing to everyone else, it at least means something to us, for we are the ones who live it.
Rating: 
Summary: The Unbearable Problems Of "Novels of Ideas"
Review: When I'd first finished reading this one, I was amazed. Finally, thought me, a book that makes me think! I was easily lured, I swallowed it up, and then I felt a vague indigestion. The first two sections, "Lightness and Weight" and "Soul and Body," are fantastically charming and vividly realized, and although these chapters are (admittedly self-consciously) "heavy," you're still in its grips; you feel a love blossoming, as troubled as any on earth, and there's sufficient detail to place you in the scene, and the philospohical stuff only enriches it; you have no reason to resent Kundera for taking you by the hand to explain how the bigger picture works. Not yet. I'd recommend the first two chapters to anyone, but the rest can be thrown out the window. Too much! Suddenly, in the midst of this powerful love story, we're asked to contemplate man's relationship to animals, Prague politics, the semantics of the word "cemetary," the reality the media creates and so forth. It could've been a great love story -more than enough grist to go on, and I ain't cheeky 'bout no love stories, either- but Kundera overshot the mark. If each of his ideas were relegated to an essay form we'd have something brilliant, but this kind of meandering only weakens the novel. The ideas are interesting, some quizzical curiosities, some stay-awake-at-night-and-ponder thoughts, but in order to deliver them too much was sacrificed. A for effort, C for product!
Rating:
Summary: The Eternal Return
Review: This book reads more like a philosophical treatise than a novel. It follows in the vein of the earlier existentialist masters, Camus and Sartre, but the book brings existentialist themes into the worlds of romance and politics. Kundera raises the question: If life is lived only once, never to be repeated, how can we know that our course is right, rather than randomly determined? We can never compare our course with alternatives or rewrite history. The book concerns Tomas, a successful doctor who is eventually forced into become a truck driver under the Communist Czech regime, and Teresa, who suffers as a result of Tomas' infidelities and has morbid dreams of death. Their love arises from a series of random coincidences, yet leads to a lifelong romance. During the course of that romance, Tomas sacrifices his medical practice to return with Teresa to oppressive Czechoslovakia, but has difficulty sacrificing his womanizing until the later years of his life. The book also charts the relationship of Sabrina and Franz, which exhibits the miscommunication between people even when they're speaking the same language. The list of misunderstood terms between the two, with each's very different connotations, shows the limits on language's ability to create a shared world. The chapters on Franz' political activism in Cambodia are especially biting and satirical. In sum, this is an interesting work of philosophy in the form of a novel, and difficult to encapsulate in a short review.
Rating: 
Summary: ES MUSS SEIN! (It Must Be! )(Beethoven)
Review: But "Es könnte auch anders sein" (It could just as well be otherwise)'
With a sweeping, stunning backdrop of Communism and the Prague Spring, Kundera's book probes the questions surrounding personal identity and individuality and what shapes lives and how people are robbed of individuality. As an entire society struggles to be recognised as an independent entity under threat of Russian tanks and violence, the characters seek individuality in their own ways. Indeed, this individuality is personified by the way each character perceives and feels love.
The story of Tomas and Tereza, Sabina and Franz, as people, is compelling and beautiful (and tragic) enough. Kundera's writing style and rich, philosophical prose is all the more rewarding. It took me years to finally sit down and read this book, and I regret all the wasted time. The book is far more rewarding than the film of the same name because the prose is so deep and worthwhile. The film, too, is good because Lena Olin and Juliette Binoche are luminous as always. Daniel Day Lewis plays Tomas well because his real persona seems to fit that of Tomas so perfectly.
Tomas is a doctor in Prague and happens to meet the woman who will be his wife, Tereza, when he travels out of town for some sort of conference. They meet by a number of chance occurrences, and the novel Anna Karenina is instrumental in bringing them together. 'Early in the novel that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition'the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end'may seem quite 'novelistic' to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on the 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.' 'But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?' 'Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.'
Tereza deeply believed in these episodes of chance and fate, believing their meeting was destined to be so. The more scientific Tomas was more inclined to believe, 'It could just as well be otherwise.' Tereza did not know at first that Tomas was a reckless womanizer and that this would come to define both of them as their relationship progressed and in fact would be what further robbed Tereza of her individuality. Early in the prose, you learn that Tereza's mother was cruel and deprived her of privacy and modesty. Tereza's adult life is permeated by a sense of needing to feel different from and unique from others. With the love of a man, like Tomas, she expected she would find that he loved her and her alone, but his ceaseless, obsessive womanizing turned her into just another woman, just another body for him to use, in no way unique from any other woman in the world. Tereza had nightmares about her position. 'She had come to him to escape her mother's world, a world where all bodies were equal. She has come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceable. But he, too, has drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them all alike, made no, absolutely no distinction between Tereza's body and the other bodies. He had sent her back into the world she tried to escape, sent her to march naked with the other naked women.' Tereza began to see life as a concentration camp'people living cramped together constantly in a 'complete obliteration of privacy.'
Tomas had many lovers, but among the most important (and central to the book) is Sabina. Sabina desired to disobey her father: 'Communism was merely another father, a father equally strict and limited, a father who forbade her love'' Sabina, like Tomas, could not be confined to one lover. She wanted to disobey convention. Not only did she have Tomas, she had many other lovers, including another central character to the book, Franz. Franz is from the West (I cannot recall whether he is from Austria or Switzerland, but I suspect the latter). For Franz, '(Love) It meant a longing to put himself at the mercy of his partner. He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defence against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall. That is why I can say that for Franz, love meant the constant expectation of a blow.' Franz believed, 'Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your (Sabina's) former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.'
Eventually Sabina and Tereza meet one another, and they form an unlikely friendship, and they both share the need for privacy that drives Tereza's search for identity. The book describes a private and intimate scene in which Tereza (who is a photographer) and Sabina photograph one another, in various states of undress. They see one another for the individuals they are, not through the lens of Tomas or external barriers.
Recurring images appear throughout the prose to illustrate different people's places in other people's lives, their relationships, perhaps. Kundera writes, 'While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.' Kundera goes on to include a 'dictionary of misunderstood words' which describes how words can be interpreted differently by different people depending on so many factors. (As an example, WOMAN, 'not every woman was worthy of being called a woman.'
The characters all played roles with regard to the revolution that swept through Prague and eventually was crushed by Russian tanks. Tereza reflected on their naïveté. They had been so stupid, spending their days taking pictures of tanks and subversion. They believed they were risking their lives for their country when in fact the evidence they produced only helped the Russians in the end when the Russian overpowered the revolt.
Many people tried to claim that ignorance about what Russian Communism entailed would serve as an excuse, but ignorance, as Kundera explains, was no excuse for Oedipus. 'Whether they knew or didn't know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn't know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?'
''Oedipus did not know he was sleeping with his own mother, yet when he realized what had happened, he did not feel innocent. Unable to stand the sight of the misfortune he had wrought by 'not knowing', he put out his eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes.'
Everyone was suspect and everyone ready to hide from the ideals that began the revolt in the first place. Tomas was reprimanded at work and was told to print a retraction to an article or letter he had written, and he faced an odd decision as well as unusual reactions from those around him, 'And suddenly Tomas grasped a strange fact: everyone was smiling at him, everyone wanted him to write the retraction: it would make everyone happy! The people with the first type of reaction would be happy because by inflating cowardice, he would make their actions seem commonplace and thereby give them back their lost honor. The people with the second type of reaction, who had come to consider their honor a special privilege never to be yielded, nurtured a secret love for the cowards, for without them their courage would soon erode into a trivial, monotonous grind admired by no one.'
When this book was new and fresh in my mind and imagination I had so many more points to make about its finer points. There are so many details and fine points to ponder, but it has been a year since I indulged in this book, and I feel I am the better for having indulged.
Rating:
Summary: Tragic, Insightful
Review: Anyone with a background in philosophy might do a double take upon reading the title of this book; "Being" is not typically thought of as being unbearably light but as heavy. The difference in this book is that for Kundera, amidst the Communist invasion of Czechoslovakia, our being becomes utterly without weight, devoid of substantive meaning. The book begins with Kundera explaining Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return (and Kundera is incredibly well read, citing not just philosophy but religion and mythology as well): the only way that anything can have any meaning is if it can be repeated. Since this life cannot be repeated, the question becomes whether or not this life can have any meaning? Kundera does not give an answer to that question, choosing to instead flesh out his characters by not only giving philosophical weight - no pun intended - to the narrative, but by giving psychological insights on their motives and actions. It is hard to say what the real narrative of the book is. Is it the meaninglessness with which Tomas engages in his endless womanizing? Is it the utter falsehood that Tomas tries to make real in claiming that sex has nothing to do with love? Despite his telling his wife that his womanizing has no effect on his love for her, it could easily be argued that what makes his promiscuity so depthless is the fact that he has no love for anyone. In the end, we see that the body and the soul are intimately connected, not divorced from one another. The interweaving of these multiple narratives is part of what makes the book so insightful. The book would be little more than a trashy (at points) psychological romance novel, however, if it weren't set in the Communist invasion of Czechoslovakia; indeed, it is the psychological and philosophical insights that are born of the experience of Communism that give the book its weight. Communism's utopian ideology was so fanatical as to be murderous - similarities between this and violent religious fundamentalists today beg for comparison - and was utterly indifferent to the particular people in the particular countries that it imposed itself upon. Communism is the socio-political embodiment of the indifference of someone such as Tomas and as such is horrifically insightful. The unbearable lightness of being is heavy; this is not a bad pun, but a recognition of the tremendous irony of it all. The isolation and erasure of meaningful, particular histories in a world devoid of giving and listening renders everything unbearably light: and therefore unavoidably and oppressively heavy. Substantive notions such as love lose all of their substance; to borrow from Marx, "all that is solid melts into air." Kundera's book is both well written and incredibly tragic. Ideology at the expense of humanity - either your own or another's (or both!) - is at the root of any soul/body dualism: the infidelity between lovers or the totalitarianism of Communism (and isn't Communism simply soul/body dualism politically imposed on a mass scale?). Such soul/body dualism is nothing more than the imaginings of philosophers; the unbearable lightness of being cannot help but to become indifferent, oppressive and violent.
Rating:
Summary: A true novel of ideas
Review: Let there be a space forever reserved for this book in that most exclusive of literary categories - the novel of ideas. Here we have an author with something important to say about the fundamental nature of life as we know it. Kundera is a world-class philosopher, cleverly disguised as a world-class writer. Rarely do we come across someone who wears both hats so comfortably. Yes, there is a wonderfully layered and textured story here. And for most writers and readers that would be enough. But the story is certainly secondary here to the powerful message that Kundera delivers about what it means to be human. In the first few pages he cuts to the core of man's existence in a complex, unpredictable world. I grabbed my highlighter after just seven pages, having already come across three basic Truths - yes, with a capital 'T' - that I wanted to come back and revisit. "What can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?" Therein lies one of the most complex questions ever asked. And in this book lies one of the most eloquent answers ever given.
Rating:
Summary: So much better than the movie
Review: I saw the movie which was made from this novel, many, many years ago, and while I absolutely loved it, I thought it was about an hour too long. Hence, my hesitation with tackling the novel. But a curious thing happend, for what I found was that the book actually "seemed" shorter. Go figure. I love the story, whether it is the film version or the written word, and Kundera's telling of it is remarkable. That said, I would recommende the book more so than the movie. Perhaps my reason for so highly praising the novel is that I was able to put it down, whereas with the movie, I was not (I saw it in an "arts" theatre many years ago.) My point is this--it's a very good read and you should check it out. Also recommended: McCrae's BARK OF THE DOGWOOD
Rating:
Summary: Kundera's Darkest Book
Review: I really enjoyed reading THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, though it wasn't anything like I thought it would be. I haven't seen the film, so the book was a completely new experience for me. Because of its title, I was expecting something lighter and more playful and, despite its dark subject matter, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING does have a "light" quality about it, though it lacks the playfulness of most of Kundera's other works. I think THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING is Kundera's darkest book. In it, he seems to be pointing out that, to a large degree, our lives are controlled, not by us, but by the forces of fate and chance. He also shows us that once an action is taken (or not taken), its consequences can never be undone. These consequences affect both our life and the lives of those around us. In a very real sense, Kundera tells us, the actions and whims of others go far in shaping our own lives. In the novel, Tomas's life was affected greatly by Tereza's impulsive return to Prague from Zuerich. Tomas, of course, made choices of his own, but it was Tereza's choice that really set things in motion. Life, Kundera seems to be saying, is both serendipitous and irrevocably binding. We are who we are, not through our own direction, but through chance and luck. I'm not a great fan of books that are "told" rather than dramatized in scenes and THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING is definitely a book that's "told." "Telling" rather than "showing" seemed to work well in this book, however. There's not much of a plot here and I felt terribly distanced from the characters, but in this case, that was okay. THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING is a thematic book and its theme is universal. The characters could have been anyone, anywhere. The narrative told the stories of Tereza and Tomas and Franz and Sabina and Sabina and Tomas and constantly cut back and forth. Kundera's writing, however, is seamless and smooth and I thought the narrative flowed beautifully. Despite the darkness of its theme, the narrative had a light, breezy quality that made it a very fast read. Although THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING is probably Kundera's best-known work, I don't consider it his masterpiece to date; I think IMMORTALITY is. I enjoyed THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING thoroughly, though, and I can't imagine why I waited so long to read it. Readers who both liked and didn't like THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING should take a look at Ivan Klima's LOVE AND GARBAGE as well. It, too, is a genuine masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Review: One of my favorite books ever read. Magnificent.
Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable for the most part
Review: The quintessential apex of the hierarchy in enjoying this novel unequivocally resides within Kundera's embracement of ideas and their translation to the page. The non-linear back-shadowing admist a political background is entertaining, as is the developing love stories between the protagonists. What is less inspiring, however, are the characters themselves, who are somewhat forgettable.
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