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A review by hadeanstars
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
4.0
I find this a difficult novel to summarise in any meaningful way. I feel positively and negatively about it all at once. I cannot decide if it's a manifesto for randy professors throughout time, or a beautiful exposition of Warholesque thinking. It feels almost dated, but in a rather fashionable way. The characters are portrayed in a manner that could be profound, but equally they might be meaningless. And I'm not entirely sure if this is deliberate. If it is, then the novel is clearly a work of unimaginable brilliance, since the title alludes to this very principle. Otherwise, it might just be the antithesis of true philosophy, an over-intellectualised foray into what it means to be human, to attempt, daily, to stay sane in an insane world.
Maybe you had to have been there, living under communism with its heavy, inescapable, ridiculous dictates - nay dictats - to appreciate this. Any society that has skilled surgeons working as window cleaners has clearly lost its marbles. But this seems to echo the covert madness of the central characters themselves, who appear to be moved by trivialities and unmoved by the profound.
All that said, it was not unenjoyable, it just had a strange almost magazine-like style. I cared about Tomas and Tereza and even Karenin, but I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that I wasn't supposed to take them seriously. This is a clever book, about clever people living idiotic lives. Some of that idiocy is the fault of communism, but plenty of it is self-inflicted too. It is like Russian literature but without the intensity or the mania. Everyone is sensibly insane! It might be brilliant, but unfortunately, I'm probably not clever enough to be able to tell.
Maybe you had to have been there, living under communism with its heavy, inescapable, ridiculous dictates - nay dictats - to appreciate this. Any society that has skilled surgeons working as window cleaners has clearly lost its marbles. But this seems to echo the covert madness of the central characters themselves, who appear to be moved by trivialities and unmoved by the profound.
All that said, it was not unenjoyable, it just had a strange almost magazine-like style. I cared about Tomas and Tereza and even Karenin, but I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that I wasn't supposed to take them seriously. This is a clever book, about clever people living idiotic lives. Some of that idiocy is the fault of communism, but plenty of it is self-inflicted too. It is like Russian literature but without the intensity or the mania. Everyone is sensibly insane! It might be brilliant, but unfortunately, I'm probably not clever enough to be able to tell.