The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

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

Shelves: i_am_in_love, fiction, philosophy, 1001-list

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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May 19, 2009 Duc rated it really liked it · review of another edition

The character Tomas was born out of a situation.
Ever wonder how people meet? It's one of the questions asked of couples. Usually the answer is in a bar. While this is a short summation that would suffice for an answer, it is elaborated upon by the author who seems to bring into question coincidences and fortuities. Tomas's room at the hotel is number 6. She gets off at 6. He calls them the bird of fortuities. Milan uses the image of the birds flying down upon the shoulders of Saint Francis of As The character Tomas was born out of a situation.
Ever wonder how people meet? It's one of the questions asked of couples. Usually the answer is in a bar. While this is a short summation that would suffice for an answer, it is elaborated upon by the author who seems to bring into question coincidences and fortuities. Tomas's room at the hotel is number 6. She gets off at 6. He calls them the bird of fortuities. Milan uses the image of the birds flying down upon the shoulders of Saint Francis of Assisi. "A single metaphor can give birth to love." These are signs that bless the unions, the more the better. And to not notice such details is to miss out on one of the pleasures of life. It is a great romance. He is an unfaithful womanizer. She, Teraza, is a provincial girl, naive, almost a pure maiden. How is she able to capture his heart so thoroughly and yet be tortured at the same time by his infidelities? Milan talks about compassion and how heavy it weighs into the heart of Tomas. "for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes." He has compassion for Tereza. His lightness has left. His womanizing and his infidelities are his lightness. They are Tereza's heaviness. The characters make choices. And because they only have one life, this choice is difficult. "We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." So Here is where Milan disagrees with the Eternal Return idea that says everything has already occur. Milan brings up Nietzsche's idea of the Eternal Return in the beginning. Some say that he spends the rest of the book defending this thesis. I think it's an academic outlook. And to come into the book with this perspective misses a lot of the other insights, insights into women, the heart, and relationship between the two. Fortunately, unlike life, one can re read a book.

Milan brings in Anna Karenina and looks at the symmetry of how Ann first met Vronsky at the train track. Someone was killed, run over by a train. The irony is that Anna commits suicide by throwing herself on a train track.

Tomas wrote about Oedipus Rex comparing Oedipex to the communist of his country.

Milan likes to bring up these references. His presence is always seems to be in the background of the narrative. So there are philosophical ponderings peppered through out the novel.
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Jun 27, 2008 Rhapsody rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, classic-literature

Amazing book. I've heard about it for years but never got around to reading it until now. Not exactly a novel, more like a philosophy book that loosely uses a few characters and situations to express various ideas about people, life, the human experience, etc. Somewhat politically geared, but not so much that you need to know about the time period or region to understand what the author is trying to say. It jumps around in time and between all the characters, but so much of the book is about the ...more

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Aug 03, 2009 Jayme Pendergraft rated it really liked it

Shelves: 1001, 2009

I was really surprised at how much I liked this book. I bought it years ago and just now got around to reading it. The back cover was, for me, completely misleading. I kind of zoned out on a lot of the sex parts and was instead fascinated by the history of Prague and the Czech Republic. The characters in this book go through a great deal of upheaval in their home and it was very interesting to read the effects communism and regime change had on their lives.

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May 05, 2009 valpal rated it liked it

Ah, a bit too deep for me. More philosophy than story. One reviewer called Tomas a man-whore lol. Why did Sabina expect Franz to understand about the bowler hat? How could he know? Sigh.

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