The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera published The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Czech in 1984-in France, where he lived in exile-and it became one of the most widely read European novels of the decade, translated into dozens of languages and eventually adapted into a film that, for all its pleasures, could not replicate what makes the book irreplaceable: its voice, which is philosophical, intimate, and unlike any other voice in fiction.

The novel is set in Prague during the events of 1968-the Prague Spring, the Soviet invasion, the subsequent “normalization”-and follows two couples: Tomas, a surgeon, and Tereza, the woman he loves despite himself; and Franz, a Swiss professor, and Sabina, a Czech artist and Tomas’s sometime mistress. These four characters serve as vehicles for an extended philosophical meditation on the Nietzschean concept of eternal recurrence-or rather, on its opposite: the condition of a world in which nothing happens twice, in which all choices are irreversible and therefore potentially “light.”

Kundera’s method is disconcerting for readers who expect a novel to stay out of its own way. He stops the narrative to philosophize, to define terms, to ask direct questions of the reader, to observe his characters from the outside with clinical detachment. This intrusion is not failure but form: Kundera is writing a philosophical novel in which the philosophy is inseparable from the story and the story inseparable from the philosophy.

What makes the novel last is not its ideas-which are sophisticated but not unprecedented-but the precision with which those ideas illuminate the characters’ choices and the tenderness with which Kundera regards them even while remaining unsentimental about their fates.