Book Review: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

I originally picked up The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera because I saw the title in a used bookstore, and I was intrigued. I absolutely loved the title, and after reading it and gaining context for the title, I love it even more with all of its many layers. This novel is definitely philosophical fiction, and I enjoyed its intricacy and how it connected to the very real characters. 

When I first started the book, I wasn’t sure if I liked the writing style. Kundera has a very unique voice. The narrative is written in third-person limited omniscient, and the narrator (which Kundera proves to be himself) inserts himself as his own character. He places himself and the reader on the same playing field and unites us in omniscience by saying “We know why,” the “we” referring to himself and to the reader. At the same time, our narrator is limited in his omniscience, because he says things like “seems rather odd to me” about a character’s actions. The prose is stripped back with a scattering of beautiful, poetic sentences and metaphors. He combines all of this with telling us rather than showing us or leaving it up to our interpretation. But the novel was so complex, particularly the philosophy of the novel, that I understand why Kundera chose to tell us some things. And there were still other aspects in the novel that I connected on my own. A third way into the book, I decided I liked Kundera’s style, or at least I got acquainted with it and didn’t mind it at all.

While I feel like this novel is more philosophy-driven rather than character-driven, a lot of the philosophy helps us delve into the characters and adds to their depth. It helped me understand their archetypes a bit more: a womanizer and the woman who stays by his side, a wanderer and the person who couldn’t get her to stay. Also, chapters like Tereza’s dreams were so creative in two ways: they blurred reality with imagination by not directly telling us they were dreams, and Tereza had such creative, complex, and apropos nightmares. They were so relevant and served as metaphors for her life. Those chapters just exemplify Kundera’s ability to build character depth and portray it so creatively. 

At the same time, the characters’ depth exists in the realm of understanding their psychological makeup. Kundera’s characters exist everywhere you look, but rather than exploring an individual, he is exploring the archetype and breaking it down into a more digestible single character named Tomas (or Tereza, Sabina, or Franz, etc.). The individuals take a backseat to the philosophical meanderings, which circle back around to help us understand human psychology a bit more. I feel like I can identify these characters out in society, as in there’s a Tomas and there’s a Tereza, but I don’t feel like you can pluck these characters out of the novel and sit them next to me. I wouldn’t be able to say, “It’s Tomas!” The a is critical in this scenario: “It’s a Tomas.” Kundera was a genius in giving these characters a specific individualistic story, but also applying every aspect of it to all of mankind. 

All of the ideas in the novel felt so original to me, and I annotated the mess out of the book. It’ll probably join The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde as my most annotated books. I was going to give a breakdown of the philosophical tidbits I found most interesting, but the philosophy is such an integral part of the novel, I feel like they’d be spoilers. You’ll have to read the novel for all of his little philosophical gems.