Unbelievable Loveness of This Book

books:


	• The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel Milan Kundera Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 242 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Poetic and lyrical

How to explain a book into which one sinks? It deftly captures all the nuances, both positive and negative, of falling in love, out of love and back again. Yet it is not a love story, not in the sense that one would imagine. It is so much more; it is written with such a light hand that the prose becomes poetic and sings itself off the page.

"If a love is to be unforgettable, fortunities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders."

"While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Fraz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them."

The best I could do to provide evidence of this book's beauty was to point to the words themselves. Yet, without the backing of all the other words they seem so much dryer than they do on the page. Some of the luster is lost when devoid of their context.

In short, read it. Read it once and it will become a book you'll read over and over again forever.

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Unbelievable Loveness of This Book

Milan Kundera has epitomized what lonliness and life is like in and out of love/lust. I enjoyed the author's insight into each character. He takes time to expose their flaws and explain only what is necessary. I enjoy this book every time I read it.

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A New Experience

I cannot offer many of the erudite reviews of my peers, however, I did read this book and have been thinking about it since I finished a few days ago. It seems to be well written, with themes that I would call profound. The amazon summary puts it nicely: "...one that requires of listeners a dollop of patience." This book had some very interesting philosophy in it that will keep me thinking for a while. About the nature of love and its power on people, about fidelity and sex and death. However, I must note that this was not an easy read for me. I may often make the mistake of choosing books in which I can "learn" some secret to life, and while this book did impart some new wisdom upon me, it was slow and difficult to continue at certain times, at least for my current preferences.

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A Thinking Man's Novel

This book will make you think. You may or may not feel any particular affection for the characters. I can't say that I did. But they do seem real, with wonderful jealousies and reservations and habits of thought and emotion guiding them through life, ever so haltingly. Noone is innocent, but noone is guilty either. Life teeters between joy and suffering, but how can it truly be suffering when one knows there will be joy again? And by the same token, how can it truly be joy, for it is so very transient, until the next period of suffering. Indeed, as short as life is, how can suffering truly be suffering and joy truly joy when it is so close to ending in either sense? But still we are jealous, still we are hesitant, still we give into desires, still we love, and need to be loved, and hurt those we love, and care for those we love, and if ever we spend time thinking too much about how soon it will all be over, well, we might just be inclined to not care at all, although we still would.

Rare is the novel, or the anything, which leads you to think you might have some new flash of insight as to how the whole damn thing works...

You have to tip your cap to Kundera and say, good job. Does he see more since he saw it though the prism of communism, and its peculiar form in Prague? Or would a man such as Kundera been able to paint a similar picture in pre-WWI England, or the golden years of California, or the roaring twenties of NYC? There is something universal here. I feel I have only scratched the surface of what he was trying to communicate.

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