What is the book about?
Superficially, it is about several soul-searching characters living in Prague during and after the Communist regime and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslavakia in 1968. Tomas, the novel’s protagonist, is an intellectual who leads a promiscuous life despite being married to Tereza, who does not condemn him for his infidelities and is judgemental of herself instead. Tomas insists that love and sex are two separate entities. He can have sex with half the world, but can love only one woman: his wife. Tereza, however, is insecure about her own body image and fearful of being perceived only as a body by Tomas. Her attempt to find happiness seems to become a reality when she and Tomas move to the countryside, where she devotes her time to caring for cattle and reading. Tomas’ mistress, Sabine, also plays an important role. She is a dissident artist who struggles against the constraints of her puritan background and Communist society. She lives her life to the extreme, taking pleasure in acts of betrayal. Sabine also has another lover named Franz, a professor who has spent his entire life in the academic world. He seeks to break out of that world by participating in protests and marches, which ends badly for him. The last noteworthy character in the novel is Tomas and Tereza’s pet dog named Karenin (of Anna Karenina). He hates being moved around, and finds true happiness when his owners move to the countryside, where he befriends a pig. In the end he succumbs to cancer, but manages to unite Tomas and Tereza before he does so.
Why this book?
This one is for the deep thinkers among you, as it will get you to think about the nature and purpose of life. It is lucidly written, with short, crisp chapters that present one puzzling philosophical thought after another through the lives of the alienated characters. It is composed as a response to Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of “eternal occurrence,” which posits that the universe and all its events have occurred and will continue to recur ad infinitum. This concept places an incredible burden on our lives because we can never break out of the circle of repetition. Kundera proposes the opposite, saying that life is “light” instead. It is light because life happens but once and everything we do is insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe. This “unbearable lightness of being” causes us great suffering because we are made aware of our insignificance and the meaninglessness of existence. We are constantly in search of meaning and happiness when these concepts are in fact quite out of our reach. The author says: “Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.” A key passage explains the central philosophy of the novel: “ Einmal ist keinmal (once is nothing). What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of Europe ... History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.” The philosophy is an ultra-pessimistic one, but it remains a challenge for every individual to find his comfort zone despite the lightness of his being. An individual’s struggle may be meaningless but he is nonetheless compelled to struggle.
What would be a good book to read after this?
Anything by Nietzsche would do. If you are looking for a book that serves up philosophy in easily digestible chunks, try Jostein Gaarder’s “Sophie’s World,” another gem of a book.
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