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Summary: nietzsche and beethoven in kundera
Review: I picked this book up when I was in junior high and I still come back to it. An awesome fusion of philosophy with fiction. The lighness/heaviness dualism is started with Kundera's musings on Nietzsche's idea of eternal return. He asks if Robespierre would seem so tyrannical if the figure did not recur in history over and over again... The whole story is constructed, following the structure of a late Beethoven quartet, the one in c-minor, I believe. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) All the literary themes and occurrences become deft quasi-musical leitmotifs in Kundera's hands, recurring with different shades and/or perspectives. The characters are terribly endearing and well-portrayed. I'd say this book is easily one of the ten best books (written in the twentieth century) I've read.
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Summary: at the very least, get it from the library.
Review: I borrowed this novel from a friend who sang its praise to no end. I have since come to the conclusion that said friend and I do not have the same taste in fiction. She seemed to glean some deep philosophical meaning from the novel, as many people do, or apparently so from all the babble going on about it. The babble is sometimes very difficult to follow, and I was in no way enightened by the novel. The sex was gratuitous and the protagonist was unsypathetic. Although I have to give Kundera some credit for writing a mildly misogynistic and wholy uninteresting novel almost entirely about sex and very faintly about oppresion, and then somehow convincing a slew of young western women (surely you've encountered a few) to tirelessly laud and contribute great genius to it.
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Summary: Love, Philosophy, Humor and Politics All in One Novel
Review: Many philosophical novels are trying so hard to make their point that they fail to make you care about the characters. This book does not hide its philosophical musings, in fact Kundera expresses his philosophy and speculative thoughts very openly and directly. And yet the characters and their story are so believable and real, and I am sure most thinking people will see bits and pieces of their own personality in one or more of the characters. Kundera succeeds completely at combining the fictional elements of a love story with the historical and political background of life under communism within a philosophical framework that asks and tries to answer questions about the nature of love, freedom, individuality and fidelity. This book will make you both think and feel.
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Summary: False premises.....
Review: I read THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING by Kundera after I saw the film with Daniel Day-Lewis. I was unimpressed with the book although I recently bought the Criterion DVD of the film mainly because I am a very big DDL fan. I have an occupational tee-shirt that says "Sociologists Get Good Marx" which we do if we study at the "right" university. Most writers don't get good Marx. Even most economists have only ever read Das Kapital. What was practiced in Eastern Europe was not Marxism but Leninism gone haywire and Kundera is reacting to this in THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING. Sociologists struggle with something called the "Sociology of Knowledge" -- how do humans think about what they think about; what are the categories of understanding; how do humans frame "reality." Sociologists enter the realm of regressive thinking about thinking because they want to understand an esoteric process they believe exists--the transmission of culture from one generation to another. As "scientists" they must go one step further and attempt to operationalize and quantify this process (good luck). Think of the Escher print of the hand drawing the hand drawing the hand and you get an idea of this literally mind-blowing activity. If you want to shoot Marxist thinking down as Kundera may have wanted to do, you don't have to throw darts at "progress" which is after all a very Western notion dating from at least the Renaissance. Rather you can accomplish your goal by identifying the idea of progress--including scientific progress--as a manifestation of "linear thinking" -- cause and effect thinking or teleological plodding. Most of us use linear thinking to survive in "real" life, i.e. if I don't kill the Saber toothed tiger first he'll eat me later. If I don't behave like a capitalist and invest my money wisely now I may starve when I'm older--especially if there are no more left-wingers in the world. Kundera begin his tale with a false premise -- that each human only has one life to live. A goodly part of the earth's inhabitants believe in Karma and Dharma. What if they have it right? Buy the film, it's great!!
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Summary: A Masterpiece -- he is my favorite author of all time
Review: Kundera is one of the greatest writers that I have ever come across. His books are beautifully written, touching, and bewildering. This book is also wonderful. I highly recommend that you read ALL his books.
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Summary: Regrettably, I saw the movie first ...
Review: ... and while I found the movie both fascinating, and amusing, (with Lena Olin and Juliette Binoche? forgetaboutit ...) the book is that and more. I am not on par with the erudite reviews posted here, "The light and the heavy" and "The end of the grand march", but I can tell you why I like it. In Kundera's writing, usually in some part of the narration about one of the characters, I meet myself, and invariably, someone I have known. This was my first meeting with Kundera, followed by _Laughter and Forgetting_. There are parts that I still re-read from time to time, for the peace that comes in knowing that the narrator understands each of us ...
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Summary: Absolutely brilliant!
Review: This book is one of my old time favorites. It doesn't follow conventional style of novel. it is a mixture of Kundera's philosophy and creativity. If you want to know what it means, you gotta read it. p.s. If you like it, you'll like "Immortality" by the same author.
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Summary: The End of the Grand March
Review: Kundera frames this novel with two basic ideas: Nietzche's idea of the "eternal return," and Parmenides notion that the world and everything in it can be classified as either positive or negative. The first, the notion of the eternal return, is, as Kundera points out, a mystical notion that allows us to think about events in such a way as to try to grasp the emphemerality of human existence. In short, the eternal return suggests that if all events were repeated endlessly, our response to those events would slowly change as we became more familiar with the parameters of those events. The eternal return would grant us a platform from which we could compare each new return to our previous response. Because we cannot, because our trajectory is always forward through time, life is unbearably "light." By introducing this conception at the beginning of his novel, Kundera is invoking the modernist tragic-comic turn to all the events that follow. Parmenides notion of classification into positive and negative is a related device that allows Kundera to interrogate events using this bipolar framework. Anyway, as a narrative conceit, this approach fixes the narratives of the main characters in a kind of timeless time, which allows Kundera to stand on the sidelines and comment upon his characters progress, to foreshadow coming events, to meditate on whatever he cares to meditate upon. Ulimately it is these meditations -- pungent, mysterious, tragi-comic -- that I found most arresting. His metaphor of the Grand March of the left -- the accepted notion of all progressives that humanity is heading toward a better world and that everything that stands in the way of the great communitarian dream are only a minor impediments to the fulfillment of a predetermined Utopian future -- is dead on, and dead on funny. Another meditation on "kitsch" -- which he defines as the absence of "merde" or the innate human trope toward sweeping the disagreeable under the carpet and signing on to those ideas, movements, and programs which are more hygenic or more spiritual agreement with those in power. Essentially, he equates all ideological beliefs and practices with kitsch or what others call the Dreamworld. There is another little meditations on the four kinds of eyes that humanity wishes to have trained upon them, depending on their predilictions: the eyes of a vast public (celebrities), the eyes of a select or elite cultural group, the eyes of the lover, or the eyes of someone to we have assigned power. These last two conceits are very reminiscent of Foucault's insights into the spectacles and surveillances that we create for one another's mutual stimulas and excitement. Kundera's character's, suspended from the intellectual notion of the eternal return, and the notion that everything can be divided into positive and negative categories, tends to get schematized. Their interactions feel like the interaction of ideas rather than people. But, because of his philosophical narrative strategy, he's able to have it both ways in a sense. Here's what I mean: each character illustrates that they are trapped by their own notions of kitsch, and are forever seeking the approval or excitements of one set of eyes or another. Kundera therefore suggests that we are made up of the most ephemeral thing of all -- ideas -- but that we are also bound to earth by the base biological functions and desires. These are not new or revolutionary ideas, by any stretch. But Kundera's expert and unsentimental probing of his characters' motivations and behaviors is quite sufficient to keep us going regardless. Interestingly, using the modernist strategy of locating the reader in the mind of various protagonists to generate different perceptual verions of the events, illustrates a deficiency in all readers. As we read the version of events from another perspective the new character takes center stage, throwing the other character's previous version of events into shadow. This tendency to identify with the character blots out, at least temporarily, our belief and acceptance of other versions of the events. Drawn in to each consciousness in turn, we are seduced and under the spell of each character in their turn. So even as he provides for us a version of the eternal return, we have difficulty utilizing this powerful notion of comparison to understand the ultimate significance of events. But hey, this is Prague, and Kafka's presence is everywhere felt in this book!
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Summary: amazing!
Review: this book was amazing. it was one of those books that literally changes how you think.
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Summary: Kundera deserves the Nobel Lit Prize
Review: This is a masterpiece of cotemporary literature. This novel starts to make the way to the new stuff that we have not yet seen. Some people say that Kundera and Jung are the masters of cotemporary philosophy. I agree!
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