The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera
1984
Rating: 6

This review will be a bit less detailed than I’d hoped. My phone died, and I lost many of my notes, including the note I had going for this novel. (Do not use Apple’s Notes app, ever. Since the app deleted a bunch of notes, I’ve seen other people report similar issues online.)

I picked Unbearable Lightness up on a lark, maybe it was a bit of a nostalgia play. I hadn’t thought about it much at all since probably the early 90s, the last time I read it. The copy on my bookshelf was in pretty bad shape. The pages were stiff as corpses and nearly the color of coffee. About two-thirds of the way through, my copy split into two halves. I’ve never had that happen while reading a novel before, maybe the spine of my copy was a stand-in for Communism!

First, the short-comings, most of which were forgivable. I did finish and mostly enjoy the book, but it started off inauspiciously.

The first red flag popped up on page 1, which alarmed me. I remembered vaguely that the novel started with a discussion of Nietzsche’s theory of Eternal Return, and toward the bottom of the page, citing an example of what would be a completely meaningless historical event, Kundera works into his discussion of the theory a hypothetical war in Africa.

I’ll just include the paragraph:

“Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow … whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, it’s horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing. We need take no more note of it than of a war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century …”

I read that and thought, “Don’t do this Milan,” but it got even cringier:

“…a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment.”

The casual racism, a term that may not have been widely used in 1984, surprised me, and it took some time to process it. I don’t think that Milan Kundera is actively racist (I have not researched his views on race), and Unbearable Lightness is not even remotely a book about race, which made the drive-by “fuck you” to Africa all the more vexing.

And this is in a celebrated novel about life under tyrannical regimes, published by a left-leaning public intellectual. Encountering this right after reading the novel I Pass Like Night, which was a bit heavier on the casual racism, changed my perception of where the country was at on race in the 1980s and 90s. I think I was ignorant and complacent about race, as was the country in general. Our “good guys,” writers whom we esteemed and thought of as artists and standard-bearers, were unwittingly (I hope unwittingly) adding their own small bricks to the edifice of white supremacy.

The passage cast a pall over my reading of the book, the first third of it, or maybe the first half. This wariness was reinforced by the womanizing protagonist, Tomas, who makes sex with many women but who expects his lover, Teresa, to be faithful. He views her as child-like and submissive and this is part of her appeal for him. He’s kind of a pig with maladaptive attitudes about women and sex, but he’s a complicated, considerate, brain-surgeon pig with a big heart!

The narrator addresses some of the gender politics at play, so Kundera does not applaud Tomas’s womanizing, necessarily; however, some of the writing did just sort of leave a bad taste in the mouth. This issue became less prominent as the novel progressed.

A few more quibbles.

The novel regularly evinced a certain pedantic tone, and you got the sense reading it that Kundera had a very high opinion of his opinions. He seems to enjoy explaining and extrapolating on common words, such as “horror,” and of course novels are supposed to interrogate language, but he did this in a kind of clumsy and patronizing tone of voice, as if he imagined himself explaining these terms to children rather than to Stephen Kosloff!

Unbearable Lightness is not particularly noteworthy in terms of its language or imagery, we have to assume the former is better in Czech. I would not say Kundera has a great eye for detail in his writing. I wouldn’t call it a marked deficit, but his talent as a novelist does not lie in these domains.

Generally speaking, the portion of the story that takes place up to and shortly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 — which is largely concerned with the relationships and sex lives of three of the main characters — is the weaker part of the book. The first half of the novel, while mostly readable, felt something like a slightly wooden European soap opera with a pretentious Nietzsche reference for a welcome mat.

The novel comes into its own, however, once the consequences of the invasion begin to play out more in the characters’ personal lives. The story-telling, and the examination of what the communist system did to its subjects, was adroit. Kundera handled it with panache and feeling. He had the benefit of working with dramatic and evocative subject matter, of course.

There were passages in the book where he was playing with the form in a way that I could not necessarily ferret out on the first read. I did have the sense that Unbearable Lightness would stand up to re-reading.

I have spent a fair amount of time discussing the book’s problems, and it does have problems, but overall I did enjoy reading it, and might even recommend it.