About the Book
One of the most influential books of our time, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is now reissued in a beautiful deluxe paperback edition.
A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover--these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel.
Controlled by day, Tereza's jealousy awakens by night, transformed into ineffably sad death-dreams, while Tomas, a successful surgeon, alternates loving devotion to the dependent Tereza with the ardent pursuit of other women. Sabina, an independent, free spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals (of parents, husband, country, love itself), whereas her lover, the intellectual Franz loses all because of his earnest goodness and fidelity.
In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel, says the novelist, "the unbearable lightness of being"--not only as the consequence of our private acts but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.
This magnificent novel encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, and embraces, it seems, all aspects of human existence. It juxtaposes geographically distant places (Prague, Geneva, Paris, Thailand, the United States, a forlorn Bohemian village); brilliant and playful reflections (on 'eternal return, ' on kitsch, on man and animals--Tomas and Tereza have a beloved doe named Karenin); and a variety of styles (from the farcical to the elegiac), to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world's truly great writers.
About the Author :
The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929-2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975 until his death. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves--all originally in Czech. His more recent novels, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance, and The Festival of Insignificance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.
Review :
"With cunning wit, and elegiac sadness, Milan Kundera, the celebrated Czechoslovak emigre writer, expresses the trap the world has become." - New York Times Book Review
"Brilliant . . . A work of high modernist playfulness and deep pathos." - Janet Malcolm, New York Review of Books
"Kundera has raised the novel of ideas to a new level of dreamlike lyricism and emotional intensity." - Jim Miller, Newsweek
"Kundera is a virtuoso . . . A work of the boldest mastery, originality, and richness." - Elizabeth Hardwick, Vanity Fair
"Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond." - People
"Encyclopaedic and epigrammatic, profound and playful, Kundera explores the intersection of the sublime and the ridiculous to give us an important chapter in the moral history of our time." - Judges' citation, 1984 Los Angeles Times Book Prize
"The Unbearable Lightness of Being is both a love story and a novel of ideas. . . . Witty, seductive, serious . . . also full of feeling and enormously experienced in the tricky interplay of sex and politics. . . . One of the finest and most consistently interesting novelists in Europe or America, [Kundera] has a powerful tale to tell." - Washington Post Book World
"A work of large scale and complexity, symphonically arranged. . . Political and philosophical, erotic and spiritual, funny and profound . . . There is no wiser observer now writing of the multifarious relations of men and women. . . . Kundera's intelligence is both speculative and playful. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is his best novel yet." - Wall Street Journal
"I return to the book again and again. Teacher, touchstone, style guide." - Taiye Selasi
"Kundera invents his own style. This novel achieves the most incredible literary fusion, blending myth, love story, musical score and political reflection. And it's this liberty that creates a reading experience that is at once intellectual and sensual. . . . I read it every year and I always find something different. It's an unclassifiable book: part novel, part treatise on philosophy and music, part essay. I don't think a lifetime will be enough to unravel its mystery." - Leïla Slimani
