The Unbearable Lightness of Being in On Paths Unknown

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

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

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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Jan 15, 2015 Karin rated it it was amazing

Initially, this book left me unsettled, confused as what to think. I felt like I wanted to retreat back to a book with a more traditional plot structure and character development. Instead, Kundera unabashedly reaches out beyond the story to pull threads from philosophy and history, subordinates his own characters to his philosophical musings, and circles back on his own story with a different emphasis the second time around.

I also didn’t know which character I should like. At times, all the cha Initially, this book left me unsettled, confused as what to think. I felt like I wanted to retreat back to a book with a more traditional plot structure and character development. Instead, Kundera unabashedly reaches out beyond the story to pull threads from philosophy and history, subordinates his own characters to his philosophical musings, and circles back on his own story with a different emphasis the second time around.

I also didn’t know which character I should like. At times, all the characters seemed unsympathetic to me, except Karenin, Tereza’s dog. By the end, I thought the author simply left me at the edge of an existential abyss. He left me confused, peering down at the potential weightlessness (or heaviness?) of my own life, my own inability to break free from “kitsch,” and where love, which is supposed to “conquer all” is often confused, selfish, needy, manipulative, delusional, and cruel. I honestly think the author intentionally wanted me to feel a sense of vertigo. It was uncomfortable and confusing.

Yet, despite my best efforts, the book refused to leave me alone. It swirled through my brain, unwanted, disturbing my thoughts, demanding to be considered. And so, reluctantly, I attempted to wrestle with the book on its own terms.

The central dichotomy of the book is weightiness vs. lightness, which, throughout the book, seems embedded in mystery and ambiguity (maybe that’s a result of my own surface understanding of existential philosophy). First, Kundera discusses weight in terms of Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal return.” What is eternal return? According to Nietzsche, events reoccur again and again, forever, without progress and never changing. Existence is “weighty” because of the infinite cycle that keeps things from being fleeting, from disappearing. Concomitant with Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return is the concept of amor fati (the love of one’s fate), or the idea that we can learn to embrace eternal return and its inherent weightiness.

Kundera’s rejoinder to Nietzsche is an “unbearable lightness,” where events do not endlessly reoccur, but are brief, fleeting, and temporary. In lightness of being, the universe is indifferent, events lose their proper context, and significance is forgotten. It doesn’t matter if life is horrible, ugly, or beautiful because events disappear in a vacuum of meaninglessness. Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once, might as well not have happened at all.

I’m not smart enough to know whether weight or lightness is better. But I wonder if that’s really the point. What is maybe more important is that we see the characters, who are small pieces of all of us after all, are struggling to construct lives of individual value and meaning in a context of fleeting time and oppressive “kitsch.” The characters are not boxed in with one or other of these labels. Indeed, most of the characters move between lightness and weightiness, between “muss es sein” (it must be) and “Es konnte auch anders sein” (it could just as well be otherwise)”. What I mean is that as I (continue) to struggle to figure out the meaning of the book, I began to see that life’s possibilities form a constellation along the trajectory of life. We constantly navigate between seriousness/lightness, comedy/ tragedy, love/hate, body/soul, and concrete/abstract. The quest for self is located in a paradox: the paradox that our identity and meaning is in the fluid construction of these concepts. I think it is precisely these paradoxes that opens a space for us in “the trap the world has become” to subvert the oppressiveness of fate, the kitsch of modern society, and the often intractable consequences of our decisions and desires.

I didn’t think I would like this book, but it has affected me in a profound way. In fact, it is now sitting next to my bedside, among my other favorite “secret emblems of brotherhood,” as Tereza calls her favorite books. I suppose it’s the friends you fight with the most, the ones you think you have nothing in common that end up opening your mind in brilliant ways. And, in the end, you find that you are kindred spirits after all.
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Mar 08, 2018 Zorlon Zorlon rated it really liked it · review of another edition

On a re-read, not as wonderful as I remember it and definitely the weakest of K's books I've re-read so far, in order, but with K, that's not saying much. It's still wonderful. If anything, I'd find fault with the somewhat leaden, heavy opening but now that I'm thinking probably way too much about it, that makes complete sense, so never mind: it's great!
Kundera didn't like the film version, so don't go into the novel expecting something similar. You'll get something more. ...more

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