The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera: Review
Book: The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Date of Publication: January 1, 1984. Pages: 314. Genre: Romance.
10 years ago now I watched the music video for John Newman’s Love Me Again. A man and woman meet eyes across the floor of a busy dance hall. The woman is accompanied by a man who glares at anyone making an attempt to approach her. Eventually they steal a moment alone from under the nose of her watchful chaperone. The couple run away together in a chase that takes them through dimly lit hallways and back alleys. They lose their pursuers and, stepping care-freely into the street hand in hand, they are hit by a truck.
I thought about this for a long time. Why the hell did it end like that? I turned it over and over again every time I thought of the song. What was the significance of the struggle for closeness in the face of serendipitous hit-and-runs? In The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera deftly paints the series of unknowable coincidences and little ironies that make up life.
Faithful Tereza is perpetually tormented by the serial unfaithfulness of her husband Tomas. Free spirited Sabine decides to leave her lover Franz the very day he leaves his wife for her. Photos taken by the Czech to protest the Russian occupation of their country are used by the secret police to make arrests.
Tereza and Tomas flee to Zurich where he carries on his philandering and his career as a celebrated surgeon. Having reached the limit of her patience Tereza leaves him to return to Prague without a word. Tomas realizes that although their meeting was pure coincidence (he traveled to a remote town to substitute for the chief surgeon on a procedure and happened to stay in a hotel where Tereza worked as a waitress) he must follow her. This is the lyrical height of the novel:
He tried to picture himself living in an ideal world with the young woman from the dream. He sees Tereza walking past the open windows of their ideal house. She is alone and stops to look in at him with an infinitely sad expression in her eyes. He cannot withstand her glance. Again, he feels her pain in his own heart. Again, he falls prey to compassion and sinks deep into her soul. He leaps out of the window, but she tells him bitterly to stay where he feels happy, making those abrupt, angular movements that so annoyed and displeased him. He grabs her nervous hands and presses them between his own to calm them. And he knows that time and again he will abandon the house of his happiness, time and again abandon his paradise and the woman from his dream and betray the “Es muss sein!” of his love to go off with Tereza, the woman born of six laughable fortuities.
[Pg. 239]
Eventually the pair are driven to become farmers in the Czech countryside both to escape the persecution of the Communist party and Tomas’s infidelities. Tereza is immensely guilty for having weighed Tomas down and deprived him of his callings, romantic and professional. In the last irony of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tomas remarks that he has never felt so light. Then they are hit by a truck.
