The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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| The Unbearable Lightness of Being | |
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| Author | Milan Kundera |
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| Original title | Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí |
| Country | Czech Republic |
| Publisher | 68 Publishers |
| Publication date | 1984 |
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Czech: Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, French: l'Insoutenable légèreté de l'être) is a novel written by the Czech author Milan Kundera in 1982, first published in 1984 in France.
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[edit] Synopsis
Set in Prague in 1968, the novel details the circumstances of the lives of artists and intellectuals in Communist Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Prague Spring, and the subsequent invasion by the USSR. The major protagonists include: Tomáš, a well-known, successful surgeon; his wife Tereza, a photographer in anguish over her husband's many infidelities; Tomáš' lover Sabina; Sabina's lover, Franz; Simon, Tomáš' estranged son from a first marriage.
The book centers on Nietzsche's idea of eternal return - that is, the idea that the universe and all the events therein have all happened before, and will continue to recur ad infinitum. Kundera challenges this idea, offering an alternative: each of us has only one life to live, and what happens once will never occur again. He calls this idea "lightness", and refers to the concept of eternal return as "heaviness" or "weight".
In describing the effect his idea of "lightness" has on a person's life, Kundera says Einmal ist keinmal ("what happens but once, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all"). By this logic life is ultimately insignificant; in an ultimate sense, no single decision matters. Since decisions do not matter, they are light — that is, they don't cause us suffering. Yet simultaneously, the insignificance of our decisions — our lives, our being — causes us great suffering. Hence the phenomenon Kundera terms the unbearable lightness of being: because life occurs only once and never returns, no one's actions have any universal significance. This idea is deemed unbearable because as humans we want our lives to mean something, for their importance to extend beyond just our immediate surroundings. Due to the subject choice, some critics have labeled this novel modernist. Others see it as a celebratory post-modern explosion of narrative craft.[citation needed]
[edit] Publication
The novel was first published in the original Czech in 1985 by exile publishing house 68 Publishers (Toronto, Canada). The second Czech edition was published in October 2006, in Brno (Czech Republic), almost 18 years after the Velvet Revolution, because Kundera didn't approve it earlier.
A paperback edition of an English translation by Michael Henry Heim was reprinted in New York by Perennial in 1999 with ISBN 0-06-093213-9.
[edit] Characters
- Tomáš - The story's protagonist: a Czech surgeon and intellectual. Tomáš is a light-hearted womanizer who lives for his work. He considers sex and love to be discrete entities: he copulates with many women but loves only his wife, Tereza. He sees no contradiction between these two activities. He explains womanizing as an imperative to explore the idiosyncrasies of people (women, in this case) only expressed during sex. At first he views his wife as a burden he is obligated to take care of, but this changes when he abandons his twin obsessions of work and womanizing and moves to the country with Tereza. There, he communicates with his son after the occurrences consequence of a letter, likening the Czech Communists to Oedipus, he published in a magazine. Later, Simon tells Sabina that Tomáš and Tereza died in a car crash; his epitaph was: He wanted the Kingdom of God on Earth.
- Tereza - Young wife of Tomáš. A gentle, intellectual photographer, she delves into dangerous and dissident photojournalism during the Soviet occupation of Prague. Tereza does not condemn Tomáš for his infidelities, and instead characterizes herself as weaker than he is. She is mostly defined by the division she places between soul and body: because of her mother's flagrant embrace of all the body's grotesque functions, Tereza views her body as disgusting and shameful. Throughout the book she expresses a fear of simply being another body in Tomáš's array of women. Once they go live in the country, she devotes herself to taking care of cattle and reading. During this time she becomes fond of animals, reaching the conclusion that they were the last link to the paradise abandoned by Adam and Eve, and becomes alienated from other humans.
- Sabina - Tomáš's favorite mistress and closest friend. Sabina lives her life as an extreme example of lightness, finding profound satisfaction in the act of betrayal. She declares war on kitsch, and struggles against the constraints imposed by her puritan ancestry and the Russian Socialists. This struggle is shown through her paintings. She occasionally expresses excitement at humiliation, shown through the use of her grandfather's bowler hat, a symbol that is born during one sexual encounter between her and Tomáš, and eventually changes meaning and becomes a relic of the past. Later in the novel, she begins to correspond with Simon while living under the roof of some older Americans, who admire her artistic skill. She expresses her desire to be cremated and thrown to the winds after death - the last symbol of eternal lightness.
- Franz - Sabina's lover. A Geneva professor and idealist. Franz falls in love with Sabina, whom he (erroneously) considers a liberal and romantically tragic Czech dissident. Sabina considers both of those identities kitsch. He is a kind and compassionate man. As one of the dreamers of the novel, he bases his actions on loyalty to the memories of his mother and of Sabina, whose eyes he always feels. His life revolves completely around books and academia, so that he seeks lightness and ecstasy by participating in marches and protests, the last of which is a march in Thailand to the Cambodian border. While in Bangkok, after the march, he is mortally wounded during a mugging. Ironically, he always sought to escape the kitsch of his wife, Marie-Claude, but dies in her presence, so that Marie-Claude claims he always loved her. The inscription on his grave was: "A return after long wanderings."
- Karenin - The dog of Tomáš and Tereza. Although physically a female, the name given always alludes to masculinity, and is a reference to the husband of Anna in Anna Karenina. Karenin lives his life according to routine, and shows extreme dislike of change. Once the married couple moves to the country, Karenin becomes more content than ever, as he is able to enjoy more the attention of his owners. He also quickly befriends a pig named Mefisto. During this time Tomáš discovers that Karenin has cancer, and even after removing a tumor it is clear that Karenin is going to die. On his deathbed he unites Tereza and Tomáš through his "smile" at their attempts to improve his health. When he dies, Tereza expresses a wish to place an inscription over his grave: "Here lies Karenin. He gave birth to two rolls and a bee", after a dream she had shortly before his death.
[edit] Film
In 1988, an American-made film adaptation of the novel was released starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Lena Olin, and Juliette Binoche.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: The Unbearable Lightness of Being |
- SparkNotes
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being at the Internet Movie Database
- Criterion Collection essay by Michael Sragow
- An essay written by Giuseppe Raudino
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