'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'
Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher: Faber & Faber / 1984
Pages: 314

This book is a 1984 novel by Milan Kundera about two women, two men, a dog and their lives in the 1968 Prague Spring period of Czechoslovakia.

Famously leaving his homeland for France in 1975 after earlier being expelled from the Czechoslovakian Communist Party for "anti-Communist activities", Milan Kundera spent 40 years living in exile in Paris after his Czech citizenship was revoked in 1979.

There he wrote the book being reviewed today and he later left behind his mother tongue to write novels in French, beginning with 1995's La Lenteur and his final novel, 2014's The Festival of Insignificance.

After Kundera died in 2023, Salman Rushdie told the Guardian Kundera had written: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Another concept by Kundera, that of the "lightness of being", warned us that life allows us no revisions or second drafts, and this could be "unbearable", but it could also be liberating.

Although written in 1982, the novel was not published until two years later in a French translation. The same year it was published in English and it was only the next year that it was published in the original Czech text.

The book's story takes place mainly in Prague in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

It explores the artistic and intellectual life of Czech society from the Prague Spring of 1968 to the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union and three other Warsaw Pact countries and the aftermath through the lives of two men, two women and a dog.

Tomas is a Czech surgeon and intellectual, a womanizer who lives for his work. He considers sex and love to be distinct entities; he has sex with many women but loves only his wife, Tereza.

He sees no contradiction in this: womanising is an imperative to explore female idiosyncrasies only expressed during sex. At first he views his wife as a burden whom he is obliged to take care of.

After the Warsaw Pact invasion, they escape to Zurich, where he starts womanising again. Tereza, homesick, returns to Prague with the dog. Tomas quickly realises he wants to be with her and he follows her home.

Meanwhile, he has to deal with the consequences of a letter to the editor in which he metaphorically likens the Czech Communists to Oedipus.

Eventually, fed up with life in Prague under the Communists, Tomas and Tereza move to the countryside. He abandons his twin obsessions of work and womanizing and discovers true happiness with Tereza.

His epitaph, written by his Catholic son, is "He Wanted the Kingdom of God on Earth".

Tereza, Tomas's young wife was a waitress in a hotel restaurant in a small provincial town. She became a photographer with the help of one of Tomas' lovers. She delves into dangerous and dissident photojournalism during the Soviet occupation of Prague.

Tereza does not condemn Tomas for his infidelities, instead characterising herself as a weaker person. She is mostly defined by her view of the body as disgusting and shameful, due to her mother's embrace of the body's grotesque functions. Throughout the book she fears simply being another body in Tomas' array of women.

Once Tomas and Tereza move to the countryside, she devotes herself to raising cattle and reading. During this time she learns about her anima through an adoration of pet animals, reaching the conclusion that they were the last link to the paradise abandoned by Adam and Eve and becomes alienated from other people.

Sabina, Tomas's mistress and closest friend, lives her life as an extreme example of lightness, taking profound satisfaction in the act of betrayal. She declares war on kitsch and struggles against the constraints imposed upon her by her puritan ancestry and the Communist Party. This struggle is shown through her paintings.

She occasionally expresses excitement at humiliation, as shown through her use of her grandfather's bowler hat, a symbol that is born during one sexual encounter with Tomas, before it eventually changes meaning and becomes a relic of the past.

Later in the novel, she begins to correspond with Simon, Tomas' son while living under the roof of some older Americans who admire her artistic skill. She then becomes Franz's lover after he confesses to her.

Franz, Sabina's lover and a Geneva professor and idealist, falls in love with Sabina, whom he considers a liberal and romantically tragic Czech dissident. He is a kind and compassionate man. As one of the novel's dreamers, Franz bases his actions on loyalty to the memories of his mother and Sabina. His life revolves completely around books and academia, eventually to the extent that he seeks lightness and ecstasy by participating in marches and protests, the last of which is a march in Thailand to the border with Cambodia. In Bangkok after the march, he is mortally wounded during a mugging.

Karenin, the dog, is a female dog, although the name is masculine, a reference to Alexei Karenin, the husband of Anna Karenina. Karenin displays extreme dislike of change. Once moved to the countryside, Karenin becomes more content as she is able to get more attention from her companions. She also quickly befriends a pig named Mefisto.

During this time Tomas discovers that Karenin has cancer and even after removing a tumour it is clear that Karenin is going to die.

On her deathbed she unites Tereza and Tomas through her "smile" at their attempts to improve her health.