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Wednesday, January 20, 2010
title: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
author: Milan Kundera
published: 1984
genre: fiction
pages: 314
first line: The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the reccurence itself recurs ad infinitum!
rated: 3 1/2 out of 5
The Unbearable Lightness of Being came recommended to me by several book bloggers. Set in Prague, it's a story about a divorced man named Tomas, who after leaving his wife and child decides to become a womanizer. He has casual sex, 'erotic relationships' he calls them, and makes a rule of 'threes'. According to his rule he can only either see a woman three consecutive times and then never again, or once every three months indefinitely. This way, nobody falls in love.
When Tomas meets and falls in love with Teresa, she is pulled into his world of infidelity and lies. Teresa and Tomas marry, and she puts up with his cheating ways.
Tomas has a long time mistress, an artist named Sabin, who herself is having an affair with another married man, Franz. As the story unfolds, you get to see different perspectives from these four characters. My favorite character was Teresa. I couldn't help but feel sorry for her, being in love with a man who could not stop being unfaithful to her, I kept hoping she would find the strength to free herself from him.
Here's a conversation Teresa and Tomas had that just really sums up how she feels about his cheating and about her loving him in spite of it.
Again she began to feel jealous and again her hands shook. When Tomas noticed it, he did what he usually did: he took her hands in his and tried to calm them by pressing hard. She tore them away from him.
"What's the matter?" he asked.
"Nothing."
"What do you want me to do for you?"
"I want you to be old. Ten years older. Twenty years older!"
What she meant was: I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.
And in this passage you can see just how desperate Teresa feels:
She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things to seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wish she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.
I really enjoyed the first half of this book. When Tomas, Teresa, Sabin and Franz stories were done being told, my attention was captured. But then the narrator goes back and elaborates a bit on each character, adding more details, which I found a bit boring at times. Towards the second half of the book, it becomes more about Communism and secret spies, that's when I began to really get bored. Not that that's a boring topic, but I wasn't expecting the story to take that direction.
The writing in this book was wonderful and sad, that's what I enjoyed most about it. It was depressing at times, there's almost a sense of despair to it. When I was done reading and closed the book, I just kind of sat back and thought on it. It's the kind of book that needs to be discussed.
Here's a few passages I liked.
On Saturday and Sunday, he felt the sweet lightness of being rise up to him out of the depths of the future. On Monday, he was hit by a weight the likes of which he had never known. The tons of steel of the Russian tanks were nothing compared with it. 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.
A long time ago, a 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 that cage was something that looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.
Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.
