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كائن لا تحتمل خفته

Milan Kundera,

ماري طوق (Translator),

ميلان كونديرا

4.10 · Rating details · 352,939 ratings · 15,983 reviews

العود الابدي فكرة يكتنفها الغموض، وبها اربك نيتشه الكثيرين من الفلاسفة: ان نتصور ان كل شيء سيتكرر ذات يوم كما عشناه في السابق، وان هذا التكرار بالذات سيتكرر بلا نهاية! ماذا تعني هذه الخرافة المجنونة؟
تؤكد خرافة العود الابدي، سلبا، ان الحياة التي تختفي نهائيا، والتي لا ترجع، انما هي اشبه بظل ودون وزن وميتة سلفا. ومهما تكن هذه الحياة فظيعة او جميلة او رائعة، فان هذه الفظاعة و العود الابدي فكرة يكتنفها الغموض، وبها اربك نيتشه الكثيرين من الفلاسفة: ان نتصور ان كل شيء سيتكرر ذات يوم كما عشناه في السابق، وان هذا التكرار بالذات سيتكرر بلا نهاية! ماذا تعني هذه الخرافة المجنونة؟
تؤكد خرافة العود الابدي، سلبا، ان الحياة التي تختفي نهائيا، والتي لا ترجع، انما هي اشبه بظل ودون وزن وميتة سلفا. ومهما تكن هذه الحياة فظيعة او جميلة او رائعة، فان هذه الفظاعة وهذا الجمال وهذه الروعة لا تعن شيئا، هي غير ذات اهمية مثل حرب وقعت في القرن الرابع عشر بين مملكتين افريقيتين فما غيرت شيئا في وجه التاريخ، مع ان ثلاثمائة الف زنجي لاقوا فيها حتفهم وفي عذابات تفوق الوصف. فهل كان سيتغير شيء لو ان هذه الحرب بين المملكتين الافريقيتين في القرن الرابع عشر قد تكررت مرات لا حصر لها في سباق العود الابدي".
لنقل ان فكرة العود الابدي تحدد افقا لا تبدو فيه الاشياء كما نعرفها: تظهر لنا من دون الظروف التخفيفية لعرضيتها، هذه الظروف التخفيفية تمنعنا في الحقيقة من اصدار حكم معين. هل بالامكان ادانة ما هو زائل؟ ان غيوم المغيب البرتقالية تضفي على كل شيء الق الحنين، حتى على المقصلة.
في عالم العود الابدي، كل حركة تحمل ثقل مسؤولية لا تطاق. وهذا ما جعل نيتشه يقول" ان فكرة العود الابدي هي الحمل الاكثر ثقلا.
اذا كان العود الابدي هو الحمل الاثقل، يمكن لحيواتنا عندئذ ان تظهر على هذه القماشة الخلفية بكل خفتها الرائعة.
لكن هل الثقل حقا فظيع؟ وجميلة هي الخفة؟ ...more

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Paperback, 280 pages

Published 1998 by المركز الثقافي العربي (first published 1984)

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Dec 17, 2008 Ben rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: good-fiction, philosophy, favorites, memorable-characters, all-time-favorites, read-in-2009, to-read-again, war, romantic-love-and-hate

I was hesitant to start this, and figured for awhile that it would be one of those books that maybe I’d get around to or maybe I wouldn’t. It just didn’t seem like something I’d enjoy – it seemed too soft, or too postmodern, or too feel-good, or too based in hedonism, or too surface oriented. What caused me to give it a shot was the simple fact that I’ll be traveling to Prague in a few weeks, and since the book's setting takes place there, I figured it may put me in the mood for the trip. I figu ...more

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Nov 02, 2016 Lyn rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This review is sung by Freddy Mercury to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody.

Is this a fiction?
Is this just fantasy?
Not just a narrative
Of Czech infidelity.

Reader four eyes
Look onto the page and read
I'm just a Prague boy, I’ve sex with empathy
Because I'm easy come, easy go
A little high, little low
Any Soviet era Czech knows, unbearable lightness of being

Good Reads, just read a book
Put a bookmark on the page
Played my audio now it’s read
Good Reads, the book had just begun
But now I've read all Milan had t ...more

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Jun 16, 2008 J rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

There is probably one novel that is the most responsible for the direction of my post-graduation European backpacking trip ten years ago which landed me in Prague for two solid weeks. Shortly before my friend Chad and I departed, he mailed me a letter and directed me to get my hands on a copy of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Just read it, he wrote. Whatever else you do, just read this book. It is about everything in the world.

Being already a Kafka fan of some long-standing, ...more

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Jun 20, 2010 Megha rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: reviews

Kundera is an unconventional writer, to say the least. If you are looking for fully fleshed characters or a smooth plot, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is not for you. Kundera merely uses plot and characters as tools or examples to explain his philosophy about life, and that is what this novel is all about. He will provide a glimpse of his characters' lives, hit the pause button and then go on to explain all about what just happened, the philosophy and psychology which drives the lives of his ...more

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Jan 06, 2008 Amy Reed rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: NO ONE

I have a bone to pick with Kundera and his following. People, this has got to be the most over-rated book of human history. I mean, references to infidelity alone (even infidelity that makes use of funky costumes like '50s ganster hats--the only note-and-applauseworthy aspect this book!) do NOT make for good literature, and such is The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in a nutshell. The male protaganist is, hands down, a one-dimensional and boring buffoon, while the female protaganist is lackluste ...more

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May 23, 2008 Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-book, fiction, novels, literature, classics, 20th-century, czech

256. Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí = L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être = The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a 1984 novel by Milan Kundera, about two women, two men, a dog and their lives in the 1968 Prague Spring period of Czechoslovak history.

عنوانها: «بار هستی»؛ «کلاه کلمنتیس»؛ نویسنده: میلان کوندرا؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش روز هشتم ماه سپتامبر سال 1987میلادی؛ و بار دوم: سال 2007میلادی

عنوان: بار هستی؛ نویسنده: میلان کوندرا؛ مترجم: پرویز همایون پور؛ مشخ ...more

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Mar 03, 2013 Becky rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Recommended to Becky by: Jen

Shelves: bookclub_work, ebook_nook, disappointing, abandoned, 2013, made-my-eyes-bleed, reviewed

13% and I'm done.

I have had a run of books that have bored me, or annoyed me, or just did nothing for me. This one is... You know, I don't even know how to describe this one.

I pretty much hated it from the first page. I do not understand the high rating on Goodreads for this book. I can barely stand the thought of picking it up again and reading more of the words telling me things about characters that I could not possibly care less about.

We have Tomas, whom we meet standing on his balcony an ...more

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Jul 13, 2008 Madeline rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: the-list

This book definitely wins the award for Most Pretentious Title Ever. People would ask me what I was reading, and I would have to respond by reading the title in a sarcastic, Oxford-Professor-of-Literature voice to make it clear that I was aware of how obnoxiously superior I sounded. Honestly, Kundera: stop trying so hard. Chill. Out.
When I first started reading this book, I really disliked it. Kundera wastes the first two chapters on philosophical ramblings before he finally gets around to telli ...more

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Sep 14, 2007 Nathan rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Suede fans.

Shelves: books-i-hope-die, fiction

The Unbearable Lightness of Being was almost unbearable to read. There was a lot of pseudo-intellectual meandering about things that deserved a little more grit. Rather, I prefer a little more reality. I didn't care about the characters, and I didn't feel like they cared about anything. I feel like saying I was impressed with the thoughtiness of this book, but by the time I typed it I'd be so buried under multiple levels of irony that I'd suddenly be accidentally sincere again. What was I saying ...more

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Feb 04, 2011 Riku Sayuj rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Riku by: Abid Hassan

Shelves: favorites, foriegn-lit, translated, r-r-rs

The Unbelievable Lightness of The Novel

I had started reading this in 2008 and had gotten along quite a bit before I stopped reading the book for some reason and then it was forgotten. Recently, I saw the book in a bookstore and realized that I hadn't finished it. I picked it up and started it all over again since I was not entirely sure where I had left off last time. I was sure however that I had not read more than, say, 30 pages or so.

I definitely could not remember reading it for a long ...more

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Feb 18, 2014 Violet wells rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: faves

Broadly speaking the power source motoring this novel is the battle between arguably the two most fundamental and often conflictual drives in the human psyche - the desire for commitment and the desire for freedom. Commitment Kundera classes as heaviness; freedom as lightness. "When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we Broadly speaking the power source motoring this novel is the battle between arguably the two most fundamental and often conflictual drives in the human psyche - the desire for commitment and the desire for freedom. Commitment Kundera classes as heaviness; freedom as lightness. "When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. Sabina had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being. Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love were gone - what was left to betray? Sabina felt emptiness all around her. What if that emptiness was the goal of all her betrayals? Naturally she had not realized it until now. How could she have? The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us. Sabina was unaware of the goal that lay behind her longing to betray. The unbearable lightness of being - was that the goal?"

"The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a basis of kitsch." One of my favourite themes explored in the book was the role kitsch plays in our lives. Empathy is often created through kitsch. American cinema knows and exploits this. The tearful reunion at the end of the film makes us feel good about the human race. "It is always nice to dream that we are part of a jubilant throng marching through the centuries..."

Kundera is often at pains to point out we don't respond privately to an experience as we would collectively. "Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing a most incredible sensation. Leafing through a book on Hitler, I was touched by some of his portraits: they reminded me of my childhood. I grew up during the war; several members of my family perished in Hitler's concentration camps; but what were their deaths compared with the memories of a lost period in my life, a period that would never return?" This is not the reaction he ought to be feeling. He's showing us what he privately feels is at odds with the prescribed feeling. And we understand there's often an element of kitsch in the proscribed collective feeling. Because we're pretending we favour the interests of the collective over the personal. "For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies."

But Kundera isn't too hard on kitsch in our personal lives - "She knew only too well that the song was a beautiful lie. As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition." It's the role kitsch plays in politics that gets his back up. "Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements." Of course, it's blatantly apparent how much of political and nationalistic and military theatre is pure kitsch. The Nazis took kitsch to a whole new level. It would be comical to watch now if we didn't know what it led to. A whole nation bamboozled into idiocy by kitsch. "Political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on the fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch." National anthems bring it out - the absurdly stiff posture, the clenched fist on heart. Taking pride in something as random and unearned as nationality is little but hollow posturing when you think about it. Nationality is not something you have achieved after all. It's simply the result of a thrown dice. And the same nationality can evoke an inexhaustible number of different images in any given individual. It's essentially a bogus idea of unity.

Totalitarian regimes include nations which historically denied women equal rights, countries which enforced racial segregation and persecuted homosexuality. "But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears." Which is why women in early 20th century Britain, blacks in America and gays throughout the world were constrained to exaggerate pride in a factor of their lives they had no control over, their sex, their skin colour, their sexuality. And when we see films now about these struggles kitsch is always present. They enable us to feel we are part of the jubilant throng marching through the centuries... Everything is perhaps ultimately turned into kitsch.

This probably isn't quite Kundera's best novel but it's a fabulous and inspiring read for all its wisdom and the playful possibilities of fiction it embraces and dramatizes. "As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself? Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one's own stomach during a moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one's fist with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying one's wit before hidden microphones-I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become." ...more

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Jan 24, 2020 Steven Godin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: czech-republic-poland, fiction

Seems odd that I'd read Kundera seven times previously and one of those seven books was not The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But for whatever reason that's the way it went down. All I can say is that it was worth the wait. I simply loved Immortality, Laughable Loves too, and this was every bit as good. If anything, I found it even better.
Before I even started reading I pondered over this cover. I knew as little as possible about the novel previously. Other than Prague, sex, and a dog featured Seems odd that I'd read Kundera seven times previously and one of those seven books was not The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But for whatever reason that's the way it went down. All I can say is that it was worth the wait. I simply loved Immortality, Laughable Loves too, and this was every bit as good. If anything, I found it even better.
Before I even started reading I pondered over this cover. I knew as little as possible about the novel previously. Other than Prague, sex, and a dog featured. Was it a man who liked wearing women's underwear? Or a woman who had a thing for Bowler hats? Or a hat, a bra, and a pair of panties from three different people? Now all becomes clear! And I can't stop thinking about Sabina's orgasmic shout!

Kundera's Philosophical musings blended together with lots of romping didn't surprise me one bit. What did though was how everything came together to make a novel with characters I truly cared for. Don't think I've come across such a warm bonding with Kundera's men and women previously. Oh, and of course there's Karenin too, who could forget, and I'm normally a cat lover. How I would have loved to play catch with him, take him for walks, let him sleep at the end of my bed, lick me in the face to wake me up in the morning. Now I want a dog!
Back to the humans - Tomas is one of four main characters born frankly of images in Kundera's mind. All of them to one extent or another enact the paradox of choices that are not choices, of courses of action that are indistinguishable in consequence from their opposite. He shows us Sabina, a painter, as she is deciding whether or not to keep her current lover, Franz, a university professor. Franz is physically strong. If he used his strength on her and ordered her about, Sabina knows she wouldn't put up with him for more than five minutes. But he is gentle, like a pacified bear, and because she believes physical love must be violent she finds Franz rather dull.
Either way, whatever Franz does, she will have to leave him and move on.

Sabina lives by betrayal by abandoning family, her lovers, and, in the end, her country, in a way that condemns her to what Kundera calls a lightness of being, by which he means an existence so lacking in commitment, fidelity, or moral responsibility to anyone else as to be unattached to the real world. By contrast, his fourth character, Tereza, the loyal wife of Tomas, suffers an unflagging love for her philandering husband that finally is responsible for his ruin in the medical profession, because it's her unwillingness to live in exile that brings him back to his fate in Czechoslovakia after he has set himself up nicely in a Swiss hospital. Thus, Tereza, the exact opposite of Sabina in commitment and rootedness, descends under an unbearable moral burden, weight and lightness, in the Kunderian physics, which adds up to the same thing. I could try and pick bits and pieces of the novel that stood out for me. Only I can't. Because I loved everything about it, all equally. Without a single moment when I thought 'Umm, does that really need to be in there'

This for me is Kundera in truly formidable form. And it's no surprise the book was, is, and will continue to be, so popular with readers. And let's face it, would it have been so popular if it wasn't for the sex? I doubt it. But it's so much more than that, and if it isn't one of the best things I end up reading this year, then I've gone completely round the bend!

Thank you Mr Kundera, You're an absolute genius! ...more

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Jan 20, 2010 Weinz rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I spent part of my lazy weekend reading this book on the grassy hills of The Huntington Library surrounded by gardens, art, and beauty. Even the serene surroundings and my sensational reading date could not make up for this book. Weak characters, horrible assumptions, pseudo philosophy, and no clear grasp of how women are actually motivated.

Only wannabe Lotharios who pride themselves as philosophers would enjoy this.

I tried. I really did.

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Mar 09, 2019 jessica rated it liked it · review of another edition

my second year at university, i took a philosophy course for my required humanities credit. this was my first experience with the subject and i realised on the first day of class that my brain is just not hardwired for that level of abstract thinking and processing.

so why, you may ask, did i read about a book that is philosophical in nature?? because i honestly cant get over how poetically beautiful the title is. just something about it resonates so deeply with me.

i dont want to give away the ...more

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Aug 18, 2017 Julie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Three hikers are out on a walk, and it starts to rain. Within minutes, they realize that they've been caught in a powerful storm, and they quickly find shelter under a rock overhang. As they are pressed back against the side of the sharp rock, they unknowingly perceive the storm in three very different ways.

Hiker #1 finds the unpredictability of the storm wild, wonderful and erotic. She knows that you can not control nature, nor would she be foolish enough to think that she could understand wha ...more

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Oct 05, 2013 Adina rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: czech, 1001, w-mwl-alternative

Milan Kundera’s book was the first title I added to Goodreads back in 2013. Despite that, it took me a while to finally read it. I guess I was a bit afraid that the philosophy dense prose will be too much for me without background in this subject. I needn’t had worried as I enjoyed most of it and I did not feell overwhelmed.

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can either compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come”

I believe that Kundera’s ...more

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Jun 18, 2016 Amalia Gkavea rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: european-literature, 1970s, 1960s, 20th-century, european-history, favorites, films, czech-republic, classics, prague

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”

A journey to the Odyssey of the human soul, its desires, its vices, all the little voices in our heads that prompts us to be mad and reckless and docile. And we can’t help it. Sometimes, this is our only response when the heart decides to take the upper hand against our firm will (not so firm then, is it?)

“She loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for t ...more

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Feb 05, 2015 Seemita rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: czech, singing_words, favorites, other-awards-w, immigration, fiction, romance

It's rare that I come across a title and intuitively tag it as an oxymoron; rarer still, I continue to silently contemplate the space lying between the duo.

Unbearable Lightness. How is lightness, unbearable? Isn’t it the right of heaviness for all I know? But the oxymoron is further granted a neighbor – Being. And that muddles up the equation for good.

What is Being? A floating mass of dissimilar silos, each absorbing and dispersing in surprisingly equal measure to stay afloat? Or a concrete str ...more

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Aug 26, 2011 Jeffrey Keeten rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: czechoslovakia

”It is wrong, then ,to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”

photo Unbearable Lightness of Being_zpsq7j2loh5.jpg

We all have odd, wonderful, and disastrous things happen to us that make us believe that, as mysterious as life is, there are still times ...more

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Nov 25, 2010 Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, czech, short-stories

Nesnesitelná Lehkost Bytí = The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover.

This magnificent novel juxtaposes geographically distant places, brilliant and playful reflections, and a variety of styles to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world’s trul ...more

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Oct 14, 2008 Robin rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: No one

Recommended to Robin by: Book club

Shelves: bad-books

I felt this book was contrived and to me it seemed as if the author tried desperately to sound intellectual. Instead he came off egotistical. First off all the meandering about Nietzche and quite frankly he set me off to start off by making statements I couldn't agree but he goes right on as if it is a trueism that everyone must believe in.

To be quite frank the characters were boring. The prose was uninteresting. There was no emotion, no real depth, and how many times to I have to hear about hi ...more

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Nov 09, 2017 Samra Yusuf rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: existentialism-philosophy, translated

The desire for utopia is the basis of the world's ills, we are too much narcissistic to take life an ingenuous phenomenon, the fear of oblivion has always titillated Man to fancy another life after this one, the failure to cope facts led Man to dwell in highlands of fantasy, and the failure to cope the ratiocination of universe made our earth pregnant with religions so many, all we were to do was to live, to live to the fullest of the moments we have here, and to love, to love those who ceased c The desire for utopia is the basis of the world's ills, we are too much narcissistic to take life an ingenuous phenomenon, the fear of oblivion has always titillated Man to fancy another life after this one, the failure to cope facts led Man to dwell in highlands of fantasy, and the failure to cope the ratiocination of universe made our earth pregnant with religions so many, all we were to do was to live, to live to the fullest of the moments we have here, and to love, to love those who ceased caring for us a long time ago, so long as we keep living, all we are to do is love.
Kundera intellectualizes this simplest of thing as “lightness of being “his story takes its origin from Nietzsche’s eternal resurrection and body-soul dualism, the air of whole book is quite blue as compared to the existential approach toward life of his main characters. The principal act of author’s imagination is epitomized by them, which is to conceive of a paradox and express it elegantly. The paradox he is most fond of is the essential identity of opposites and he is never hesitant to express it time and again....
It could easily be a “book of sexual encounters” as we come to witness so much of what is normally expected of the reader to grasp on his own, in an explicit manner, giving the book an artificial aura sort of, we might be concupiscent for a while and commiserate at the other, the whole air of the book and tone never touches the inner chords, it seems to be merely populated by some puppets the author had to place in order to exert his philosophy, I might conform to his idea of living life but I remained totally detached from the fashion his characters adopted to put it in practical.
At times I felt kundera was desperate to done his philosophical musings in robes of an erotic story, he failed at both grounds miserably. He writes beautifully, quite redolent even, he has that scholarly tone in his prose we so savor in writings, (recall the sumptuousness of Marry Shelly in her Frankenstein) but just can't be taken seriously as a work of philosophical or psychological depth. ...more

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Jun 07, 2007 dirt rated it liked it · review of another edition

the people in this book have a lot of sex. 75% of the book is getting down and doing the nasty (or thinking about it). the sex parts are written in that lofty academic language of "heat" and "passion". the word moist is used liberally. all the really raunchy stuff about body fluids is left out. though probably not too much fluid was exchanged because these people fucked and fucked and fucked and never had babies. the really interesting stuff comes between the sex parts.

the book is propelled alon the people in this book have a lot of sex. 75% of the book is getting down and doing the nasty (or thinking about it). the sex parts are written in that lofty academic language of "heat" and "passion". the word moist is used liberally. all the really raunchy stuff about body fluids is left out. though probably not too much fluid was exchanged because these people fucked and fucked and fucked and never had babies. the really interesting stuff comes between the sex parts.

the book is propelled along with a series of misunderstandings. coincidences and other people actions are easy to misinterpret. is this song playing because the universe is conspiring to send me a message? do you understand me when i stand naked in front of a mirror wearing a bowler cap? probably not, unless you have read this book. shared understanding only develops over time.

the idea of the soul is huge:

"A long time ago, man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what they were. He was unable to identify himself with so alien and unfamiliar an object as the body. The body was a cage, and inside the cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought, and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.

Today, of course, the body is no longer unfamiliar: we know that the beating in our chest is the heart and that the nose is the nozzle of a hose sticking out of the body to take oxygen to the lungs. The face is nothing but an instrument panel registering all the body mechanisms: digestion, sight, hearing, respiration, thought.

Ever since man has learned to give each part of the body a name, the body has given him less trouble. He has also learned that the soul is nothing more than the gray matter of the brain in action. The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice.

But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away."

a question raised by the author, is our body a reflection of our soul? do we have a pretty face because we have a pretty soul?

another topic was our life as music. the motifs introduced early in our life are repeated as we grow older. when we are old the music is largely set. few new themes and ideas are added.

i don't particularly agree with these ideas, but it does give you something to munch on and ponder. the book abounds with interesting and unanswerable questions. you might be asking yourself, "what does mr. kundera think about questions?"

this is your answer:

"Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive questions are truly serious. They are questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit for human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence." ...more

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Nov 24, 2012 Samadrita rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: european-literature, czech-republic, 1001-and-more, re-readable, philosophy-philosophical, human-drama, semi-favorites, romance, existentialism-absurdism, bygones-are-never-bygones

Rarely do I come across a book which stubbornly evades categorization of any kind, managing to keep the reader behind a veil of mystification till the very end. Like while you were reading, the book kept on giving you one insightful glimpse after another into the convoluted workings of the human psyche. But when it ended, whatever the narrative managed to encapsulate within the scope of a few hundred pages, vanished in a puff of smoke without leaving any tangible proof of its prior existence.
I Rarely do I come across a book which stubbornly evades categorization of any kind, managing to keep the reader behind a veil of mystification till the very end. Like while you were reading, the book kept on giving you one insightful glimpse after another into the convoluted workings of the human psyche. But when it ended, whatever the narrative managed to encapsulate within the scope of a few hundred pages, vanished in a puff of smoke without leaving any tangible proof of its prior existence.
I will, perhaps, be accused of being desperate about drawing correlations between the title 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' and my own experiences with the book, but as much as there maybe a little truth in that allegation, the book did make me feel exactly the way I stated. It made me experience a sort of dizzying lightness after I was done with it, made my existence seem like an inconsequential matter, as if I am always making more out of my life than what it actually is, just the way Tomas, Tereza, Franz and Sabina did.

Essentially, this is a novel of ideas, so flexible and rapidly altering, that it can easily bend itself to fit whatever shape one's mind is in. In fact I believe, different readers will arrive at different interpretations after reading.
While weaving its way in and out of the lives of its 4 main characters and their individual reflections on various subjects, the narrative manages to capture the throes of a nation caught in the vice-like grip of Soviet persecution in addition to losing its way occasionally in a thread of philosophical rumination.

What constitutes real suffering? Is the threat of Communism spreading over Eastern Europe the real malaise leading up to the continuous cycle of oppression perpetuated by totalitarian regimes or are all political ideologies capable of sowing seeds of future conflict? Are humans inherently averse to status quo or does there exist a general human resistance to both change and continuity? Does romantic love really entrench itself into the Platonic theory of finding the missing pieces of ourselves or is that just a mere attempt on our parts at dramatizing an utterly mundane occurrence? Is love the end-result of a fortunate crossing of two different paths or is it an amorphous entity which rests somewhere in the realm of the incomprehensible and the ineffable? Don't we often mistake commiseration for love, imagine our emotional attachment to people and places rather than actually experience it?

Milan Kundera leaves us with a lot of disturbing existential questions to ponder over but doesn't struggle to answer any one of them definitively, choosing, instead, to leave us in the middle of a fruitful discussion where the reader is as much a participant as the writer. Perhaps because there are no clear-cut answers to these questions. For as much as we strive to fish out meaning from the jumbled mess of our lives, accord some greater significance to each one of our decisions, actions or sentiments, eventually every one of them is steeped in the fundamental need for some deeply personal, even preposterous wish fulfillment.

"....Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life."

P.S.:- I'll never view the word 'kitsch' in the same way again.

P.P.S:- Do read it, if you haven't already. ...more

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Jan 22, 2009 Chloe rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-list, fiction, philosophy, i_am_in_love

You know those books that you finish and then immediately begin again because they were just that good? That's what happened with Unbearable Lightness and me. After turning the page on the incredibly heart-wrenching last chapter, I needed to begin it anew so that I could savor those doughnuts of wisdom that Kundera tosses out like they were stale day-olds.

After reading the first few chapters of the book, I wrote a note to myself that said "If Love in the Time of Cholera is a representative of La You know those books that you finish and then immediately begin again because they were just that good? That's what happened with Unbearable Lightness and me. After turning the page on the incredibly heart-wrenching last chapter, I needed to begin it anew so that I could savor those doughnuts of wisdom that Kundera tosses out like they were stale day-olds.

After reading the first few chapters of the book, I wrote a note to myself that said "If Love in the Time of Cholera is a representative of Latin passion and willingness to fling oneself off the cliffs of insanity, then The Unbearable Lightness of Being is its Teutonic counterpart. This book is filled with enough neuroses, doubt and angst to keep Freudian analysts busy for thousands of billable hours and make the reader wonder whether love is even worth all of the trouble." I thought that would make a great beginning of a review. Then I kept reading and realized that my first impressions, that this is a book about love and it's fall-out, was a remarkably short-sighted interpretation of this grand epic.

Sure, this book deals with love, but only so far as we can say that life inevitably deals with love at some point along the way. Kundera's greatness is that he attempts to chart the intertwining paths of life that groups of people take and how chance encounters that mean so little to one party can have profound, life-changing ramifications for the other. How one person can be cursed to flit through life living only skin deep, the titular Unbearable Lightness, while another drags their guilt and lust with them like some albatross strung about their neck. How national identity does shape who we are, no matter how far we run from the country itself.

Any review that I could write of this book would do no justice to the book itself. It is beautiful. It is heart-breaking (I could title this review "Animals in Literature and Why They Kill Me Every Fucking Time"). It gives you hope for your own life and then rips it away at the last possible second. This is a book that makes you believe that writing is an art form and the grandmasters of the craft are sorrowfully few and far between. This is a book that I know I will reread again and again as the years go by and experience reshapes me along the way, if only to see how these different iterations of Logan react to Kundera's genius. ...more

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Nov 20, 2011 MJ Nicholls rated it liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to MJ by: Book Group Laddie (#1)

Shelves: novels, eastern-europe

A good Europop lit-fic offering—a bit outmoded now, like Snap! or 2Unlimited. But still compelling fodder for philosophising undergrads with higher aspirations than erotic encounters with their right hands. The narrator is droll, sardonic, wise, and almost unbearably smug. In fact, I thought about using the line The Unbearable Smugness of Being but I decided not to because . . . drat! Also: I have vivid memories of the film version, where Juliette Binoche’s underpants ride up her crack in a most ...more

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Mar 06, 2011 Darwin8u rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012, 1001-ante-mortem

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being

description

After hearing last month that the great Slavic translator Michael Henry Heim had died, I thought it was about time to read some Kundera. I enjoyed the concept of ULoB probably better than the actual book (although I still felt the book was exceptional). I certainly have my own issues with both Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrance and Kundera ...more

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Dec 25, 2016 Matthew rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: completist-book-club, library, 2016

Really 3.5, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt and rounded up to 4.

This book is a series of anecdotes with moments of deep and surreal introspection. There are several time jumps that throw off the linearity - sometimes causing confusion, but not too badly. All of these are part of one all encompassing story.

Basically a story of sexuality and the cold war in Czechoslovokia. The beginning two sections were a little hard for me to get into, but after that I either got used to the writing or th ...more

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Mar 12, 2007 Diana Polansky rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: all

"Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)."

A philosophical window into love, passion, jealousy, and duty--set during the Russian invasion of the Czechoslovakia. When you read this, you will re-evaluate your relationships--past and present--and wo ...more

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Apr 03, 2017 Duane rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed-books, 2017-book-challenge, french, rated-books, guardian-1000

This is not your everyday run of the mill novel. Not everyone is going to like it. It's enigmatic, provocative, philosophical, and somewhat confusing at times. It's a little romantic, a little historical, a little political, and all that makes it sound unappealing, but it's not. It's beautifully written, it's character driven, I mean really character driven. There are three main characters, Tomas, the surgeon turned window washer, Teresa, his shy and devoted wife, and Sabina, his mistress, the k ...more

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About Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera is a Czech and French writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized French citizen in 1981. He is best known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke.

Kundera has written in both Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; these therefore are not considered tr ...more

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Quotes from كائن لا تحتمل خفته

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.” — 3409 likes

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.” — 3223 likes

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