Are you all stupid?

books:


	• The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel Milan Kundera Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 241 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Simply the BEST

I don't need to tell you how good this book is. But I would like to tell you all that this book has changed a guy who thought reading is a waste of time, simply because all the book he read in his earlier life is not even close to the intensity how this book shocked my life. This is the FIRST book that I ever thought after I read a few pages that " aHHHH......this is really interesting and I never thought about things in such a way" instead of repeating the IDEA a few times with different interpretation like the rest of the book. I highly recommend this book to all of you. And if anyone of you are interested in the movie, I would suggest you to read the book before you watch the movie, since the movie didn't explain a lot of important ideas of the story. Best Wishes

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Are you all stupid?

There is not one version of good, and layers change the meaning of the others. Im not going to go to great length to think you are all being silly...but you are, and its no good. If you can make it through a serious text, you can make it through this, in meaning and in actual reading...if you can't then you are a person who can't make it through a serious text either because of impatience or inability to red beneath the lines, or your not already familiar with the philosophy going on (your fault)...I find it funny how when ever anyone doesn't like something they presume it to be the fault of the "thing that they are using" heh, nay never is an adverse interaction with an adverse world a telling sign of ourselves and the relation we stand to it...its just "dumb" or "it sucks" or its "not cool"...ach. Oh well nothing matters, just go buy something else and throw it away and then get old and replaced like the things we refuse to think about....

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Magnificant

Love, philosophy, intrigue - this book has it all. Kundera is a master of explaining the human psyche and delving deep into the mind of simple men and women, to create a story about human nature.

Light but sound

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the only book I have read three times as I had a conviction that its playful, meandering variations encased hard truths that I didn't grasp on the first two readings. (The other book I have read three times is Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, for reasons I cannot fathom).

The third reading, I felt I just about cracked it.

Kundera's purpose is to highlight the souffle whimsicality of human existence by highlighting two modes of viewing the world: lightness and weight. Lightness, as exemplified by Parmenides is a mode of viewing human life as a series of burrs on the wind. You might as well enjoy yourself while you are alive as you will disappear at the end with barely a smear left on the gusset of existence. On the other hand, Nietzsche wheels in the great steamroller of Weight with his doctrine of eternal return. Every moment in human existence is suffused with immortality, as it is etched in history forever, doomed to repeat itself ad finitum (this is similar to the view espoused by Wittgenstein at the end of his Tractatus of human life being like the extremes of your visual field: it is immense, and all conquering, and the very last second of your life is as huge as any other). On this view, you had better be aware of the jackboot of your decisions, because you're writing them deep into the essence of the Universe, and you only get one shot.

Kundera sets up these two poles as the basic extremes of human psychology and weaves the story of Tomas, Tereza, Franz and Sabina around them. Tomas is a great Kundera character - coldly cerebral and intellectual yet a formidable womanizer - not in an egotistical macho sense but an aesthetic philosophical sense. In a marvelous passage depicting an erotic encounter with a woman who looks like a stork, he focuses on his desire to encapsulate the woman's soul, through the power of eros.

Tereza, his wife, is an adorable personality. Suffering an abused childhood at the hands of her tawdry and bullying mother, reacting by growing up cultured, weighty and romantic, she packs her belongings in a suitcase and arrives in Prague desperate for Tomas to take her world into his life. This he does, and over many years Tereza suffers for her tortuous love for Tomas as he continues his libertine love affairs. Her weighty despair gradually wraps itself around Tomas's philosophical hedonism like a benevolent yet stubborn creeper. At the start of the novel he refuses to have another bed in his flat so no woman can stay the night. By the end of the novel Teresa has won him over and he has subordinated his career, his women, his 'mission' to the happy joys of companionship. (Then they die the next day, ah well).

Franz is the saddest character of the novel, a lugubrious academic hopelessly unsuited to his artist wife Sabina's libertine fleet footednes. Sabina loves the idea of being dominated (what is it with Kundera and humiliation of women? Most of the while his style is supremely elegant discourse on the highest of European culture, but every so often he lapses into the kind of fervid, porn-ese in the mode of those Nexus erotica books that truckers buy at motorway service stations featuring lingerie clad derrieres on the cover and titles like 'The Subordination of Susan). Her bowler hat serves as a famous leitmotif for this. Tomas uses it as a tool to degrade her, a sport Sabina likes. Franz refuses to do this, shunning his strength (he is one of those unfortunately naive men who believe that masculine strength should be renounced in a civilized world and the way to a woman's heart is by pandering to her wishes).

In the end, the characters (three of them) die as they have lived - one a meaningless, political death, the other two in a car crash, together. What have they left? Nothing. An inscription on a headstone. But their lives, though displaying much light, are very sound as well, and the enlightened reader would do well to digest what Kundera is outlining in this novel, and see how it applies to his or her own life.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

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