The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera
Summary
Tomas, a Prague surgeon who treats fidelity as a kind of imprisonment, moves through a long string of affairs organized around what he calls erotic friendship, a lightness he protects fiercely until a waitress named Tereza arrives at his door with a single suitcase and a copy of Anna Karenina, and he marries her almost against his own philosophy. Tereza, plagued by nightmares and by the smell of other women on Tomas, cannot make peace with his infidelities the way he wishes she could, while Sabina, a painter and one of Tomas's longtime lovers, pursues her own version of lightness through a series of departures, from her country, from her lovers, from anything that threatens to become permanent commitment. Sabina's most serious relationship, with an idealistic Swiss professor named Franz who leaves his wife for her only to watch her disappear without warning, ends with Franz dying, absurdly and far from her, after a mugging in Bangkok, still holding onto an idea of Sabina that has little to do with the woman herself. After Soviet tanks crush the Prague Spring in 1968, Tomas and Tereza flee to Zurich, but Tereza's growing sense of purposelessness pulls her back to occupied Czechoslovakia, and Tomas, choosing her over his own safety and eventually his medical career, follows. Stripped of his surgical post and reduced to washing windows and then farm work under the new political order, the couple finds an unexpected, settled happiness in the countryside before dying together in a car accident that closes the novel almost gently, after everything the book has argued about how much weight, or how little, a single life can bear.
Kundera interrupts the story constantly with essayistic digressions, on kitsch, on Nietzsche's idea of eternal return, on the political meaning of a wagging dog's tail, so the novel reads as much like a philosophical argument illustrated by characters as like a conventional story, a structure some readers find exhilarating and others find keeps real intimacy with Tomas and Tereza at arm's length.
Historical Context & Significance
Kundera wrote the novel in Czech under Communist rule and it first appeared in French translation from Gallimard in 1984, since Czechoslovak authorities banned his work at home; Michael Henry Heim's English translation, published the same year by Harper and Row, reached readers even before an underground Czech edition circulated. It won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction in 1984, but no larger prize followed, though the novel became one of the defining international books of the decade, its portrait of love and political repression in occupied Prague read widely as a document of what the country's intellectuals had actually lived through.
Philip Kaufman's 1988 film adaptation starred Daniel Day Lewis, Juliette Binoche, and Lena Olin, though Kundera later said it had very little to do with the spirit of either the novel or its characters, and he grew far more protective of adapting his fiction afterward.