The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Just finished reading this interesting book. Even if I hadn't read its reviews earlier, it's intriguing name was enough for me to give it a go.

There are four main characters in the book. All are leading confused lives, kind of and their destinies are a result of coincidental macro and micro happenstances. The central character in the book, Thomas, is a confused, likable and incorrigible womanizer.

At times Kundera starts talking about himself or speculating about the characters as if they had life outside of his own imagination. For example, at some point in the novel he goes: "Even I find it difficult to explain what she felt ..". Or another time "I think Tereza's problems were due to .. had it been otherwise..". Funny.

Some of the passages in the book were so compelling that I had to keep a pencil ready so that I could mark them and go back to them when I felt like. Many other times I couldn't figure out if Kundera was being just flippant or dead serious.

All in all there is not a thick plot to speak of. Its somewhat of a character study on the backdrop of philosophical mind benders.

Sometimes Kundera just leaves off the character's stories and gets into his opinions on their conditions and fate, and starts relating to his personal philosophy. Other times he starts advocating some concepts using the characters conditions for example the whole section on "A short dictionary of misunderstood words".

One thing that he has done very well is to bring out the suffocative era of Russian and Czech communism. I had read "The Master and Margarita" a while back and it was supposed to be excellent in that regard but I didn't think much of it. This was way better.

Though notwithstanding this passage mocking rich capitalistic nations:

When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder that cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.

Another witty philosophical observations I couldnt help underlining:

Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).

There is also a strong "franco nature" to the novel, where arbitrary quirks in characters play an important part (think Amelie).

All in all an interesting read if one wants reflect as much as read every once in a while. The kind I like to read.