After a brief hiatus, I was back for the Germany book club this month. Illness and the Covid-permissible travels of the season meant numbers were thin on the ground. Plus I had the honour of being the only one present who had read the book the whole way through. Such is my lack of a social life…
Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is considered (I never really know how such accolades are won) as something of a modern classic, a book everyone should read, etc. This was my second reading of the novel and first for a decade, and it is structured in quite an unusual manner. The unidentified narrator tells the story, interspersed with his philosophical musings on various topics, and the timeline shifts all over the place, giving one-line giveaways of major plot events and then going back and re-telling from a different characters perspective. It’s quite an effective method once you get used to it, but the meandering nature could have been why other members struggled to finish or really get involved in the story.
The underpinning theme of the novel is that life only occurs once, and that every event in life occurs only once and never again. Hence the ‘lightness of being.’ Kundera uses this idea of lightness as freedom, and the main character Tomas certainly lives free from the burdens of consequence, with his vast array of lovers and long-suffering wife at home. His mistress Sabina also displays this lightness, taking satisfaction, not guilt or shame, from the act of betrayal. Tomas’s wife Teresa is the opposite, ‘weighed down’ by her husband’s infidelities but blaming herself for his actions. Indeed, the author’s notion of love and sex is defined as light, love being seen as fleeting and brought about by coincidence rather than strong feeling.
But Tomas does commit in the end, in the end deciding that if there is only one shot at life, then committing to someone can be accomplished without it becoming ‘heavy’. I haven’t explained the idea perfectly, but I’m sure you get the idea!
My favourite parts of the novel were the more political sections. Tomas gets in trouble with the Communists in Prague because of an article he wrote whilst a surgeon. Franz, a lover of Sabina and something of a dreamer, ends up seeking his ‘lightness’ in Thailand, joining a protest march on the Cambodian border and ending up mortally wounded in a Bangkok mugging. These scenes were more meaty and apprehensive than the philosophy stuff, and provided a nice contrast.
There’s tons more I could say about this novel – it has a vast array of reflections, religious and historical themes, and a spot of magical realism. It’s very much a novel of ideas, and interpretation of those ideas based on a number of differing viewpoints. It’s style may put some off, but I would persevere – it never tries to answer the existential questions, it forces us to look at them to make sense of what can seem a jumbled, haphazard life.
The Beautiful Fight 