Rating: 
Summary: Loved it -- philosophical but very accessible.
Review: It's a tired cliche, but this is one of those books that I'd like to give six stars. There are books that I know are really good and deserve five stars, and then there are books that are both good and strike me so deeply that I can't rate them highly enough. A novel like "Lightness of Being" makes me want to go subtract a star from all my other reviews -- it's the only way to do it justice.In the first ten or twenty pages Kundera succinctly lays out his dichotomy of lightness and weight. He asks if it is better to be "light" and know that your actions have no consequences, but no importance beyond yourself, or to have "weight" and know that your actions are meaningful, but will be judged by your peers and successors. I think the book is well-written enough throughout to be engrossing and thought-provoking but still very accessible. I don't have a big philosophy background myself but I grokked everything he was trying to say (as far as I know). Farther into the book he dwells more on love and commitment and adultery -- less fundamental subjects than the opening discussion, but his treatment is still interesting and poignant. I haven't seen the movie, but a friend of mine who has assumed the book was some kind of gushy soft-core erotic pseudo-philosophy. Not at all! It might not strike you in the gut like it did me, but I think the existential issues he talks about are universal enough to appeal to anybody.
Rating: 
Summary: God-awful crap
Review: It seems that Kundera got confused between writing a philosophical treatise and a novel--a nasty experience to say the least. Instead of creating characters and action, Kundera get's bogged down in his own philosophical wanderings on life, and just him mentioning such greats as Nietzche and Tolstoy in this book makes me want to vomit. Thank God both those writers are dead, but I on the other hand was not spared from the stench of this literary poop. It truly contains some of the most frightful prose ever written. Yes.....it's that bad.
Rating: 
Summary: a juxtaposition of weight, lightness, and angry bears
Review: I honestly don't understand the function of the angry bears in this story, and if anyone out there does, I'd love to hear it. It's a great book. Tomas and Tezra cope with existential angst, have sex, cope with existential angst, cheat on each other, and cope with existential angst. This is really a departure for Robert Jordan, whose perennial Wheel of Time series has carried him into fantasy legend; more importantly, however, it is a vehicle for actor Kevin Bacon, who (it is almost certain) will star in the screen adaptation. Without giving too much away, I will point out that there is a great deal of confusion near the end, involving a family of angry bears, an anthropomorphic bee hive and Tezra, wandering through the streets of post-war Czechoslovakia; I think there's some kind of message in there, but I'm not sure what. All in all, a great read.
Rating:
Summary: odd
Review: This book put me in an strange position. Typically I either fall in love with a book (often because of the characters), or I wonder why I bothered finishing it (likewise). In this book, I honestly did not like the characters. It's not Kundera's fault--in real life, I would not like these people. But I liked the book. It wasn't a favorite, but it was worth reading. I enjoyed it.
My friends, on the other hand, adore it.
Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended
Review: The fact that the publisher calls this series "Perennial Classics" should be enough to tip anybody off. Unless you've been living in a cave away from Western Civilization (or simply haven't entered your senior year of high school) you've probably heard of Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. What you've probably discovered (as I have) is that not all "classics," perennial or otherwise, are both truly enjoyable reads and easily understood. The nice thing about Kundera, in this works and in many of his others, is that the meaning isn't deep and hidden. Its right on the surface. Kundera infuses incredible themes and an uncanny ability to examine multiple facets of human nature, yet he manages to do it in a way that isn't daunting to anybody with more than a high school diploma. The philosophy -- often Nietzschean, and abounding -- is explained in fluid expositions that accompany the narrative. I'm not one to give away plot secrets in reviews, but the themes touched in Unbearable Lightness include love, longing, loyalty, and adultery, to name a few. The book is easy to understand on a variety of levels, wheather you take the philosophy and try to understand why, well, being is so unbearably light, or wheather you grasp the adultery and love themes, this book is definately a must read.
Rating:
Summary: an apathetic frenzy of existential angst
Review: We are all born, we live and we die. In between many things occur - some of which make us happy, and some of which make us miserable. Some even stir our loins for a moment. That's it in a nutshell, folks! The writing is adequate, and numerous characters have sex with each other. If that is your cup of tea, and you revel in ennui and other French diseases of the soul, by all means buy this book. I did laugh uproariously at the remarkable section about the importance of feces. Funny stuff. Hence, two stars rather than one.
Rating: 
Summary: Too light
Review: Kundera's novel of ideas is (unlike boring phantasmagorias of Rushdie or Fuentes) a very readable & enjoyable potmodernist fiction. What makes it interesting (at least for me) are not its technical bravuras (originating in the "Dear reader" 18th. century conventions of Sterne and Diderot), nor its quasiphilosphical musings (it's witty & playful compared to Mann's pedantic ponderosity or Dostoevsky's feverish intensity). No- the author's voice, either directly or transformed through his fictional "characters", is the true center of the book. And this voice lays bare an average Western liberal intellectual mindset: sensual, sensitive, secular, ironic, ...and weak. Life without faith. Faith in anything. Life, God, self, country, art, humankind, justice, ...Nothing. I'd highly recommend this book to all defeatists. By overrelativizing everything (in a superficial manner, using essentially frivolous concepts), Kundera offers many ways of escape & justification to all traitors, weaklings, snitches, philanderers, empty or alienated men & women. This is a work of a man who has not acquired wisdom, but whose mentality still functions on a level of ratiocinated physiological S & R. That's puerile.
Rating:
Summary: The Lightness of Unbearable Lightness
Review: Despite the ponderous tone of its opening chapter on Nietzsche's eternal recurrence of the same, Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" possesses a bit too much of the levity that the title promises to explore. While Kundera's language is both tender and witty, the narrator/author of the book lacks the self-irony that his dialectical, sometimes nearly catechistic style begs. Perhaps because the narrative fixes itself along the notion of eternal return, the novel explores the intersecting relationships of its main characters, divulging their motives, nuances, and fears along narrative paths that terminate neatly at likewise interconnected origins. Despite these criticisms, I found "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" to be a pleasurable book to read. Broken into brief, episodic chapters, it artfully assumes the different perspectives of its protagonists. I recommend it as a good love story, but qualify this recommendation with the criticism that its process of reading ends as viscerally as Tereza, one of its main characters, is begotten into writing. Like a grumble in the stomach, one feels "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," and then it is digested, only its memorable characters absorbed.
Rating:
Summary: One of my top 5 books.
Review: This book was really a revelation to me. It's really hard to explain how wonderfully insightful it is without giving anything away. Suffice it to say that he led me to understand that the "specialness" of relationships is not really held in the place that we tend to think it is. This book can be read quickly or slowly and is very enjoyable either way. Kundera has lived through a lot, and understands how to cry at the sad times, laugh at the funny times, smile at the happy times, and be content with your life throughout.
Rating:
Summary: a cascade of epiphanies
Review: "The unbearable lightness of being": this title reeks of some academic existential manifesto, and while philosophical ideas percolates throughout the book, erupting in the form of theoretical digressions, this book is a novel, not a treatise. Mr. Kundera has a wonderful penchant for fanciful tangents that entertain in their own right, but also add depth to the characters. Ultimately, the books through its characters and their digressions, gives a far more fuller picture of the unbearable lightness of being than any didactic philosophy text ever could. This book is not especially heavy or pedantic, but it is a fairly challenging read. It's not something you can read on the train to work.
|
