The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a novel that makes me think about man-woman relationship, about fidelity and infidelity. Why do people commit extra-marital affairs? Is Tomas in love with his long-time lover Sabina? Why is he a perpetual seducer? What about Sabina's relationship with Franz? Compassion is a very heavy emotion indeed. There is also the thing about sticking to your principles even at the expense of being fired from the job you love. I guess that is the thing about good books. They leave you with a lot of questions to ponder about. Good literary fiction are usually not so much about the plot. They are usually more about the inner narratives of the characters. There are not the easiest books to finish as they can be quite boring sometimes. I took about six months to finish The Catcher in the Rye because in between reading it I got distracted and I started reading and finishing other books.
I did not read the last chapter of The Unbearable Lightness of Being entitled Karenin's Smile. I just skimmed through. Karenin is Tomas and Tereza's beloved dog and most of that chapter was about Karenin dying of cancer. It is too sad for me.
Plot Summary from Spark Notes
The year is 1968. The protagonist, Tomas, a brilliant Prague surgeon, pursues a philosophy of lightness in his erotic adventures and exploits. Briefly married in the past, he neither sees nor wishes to see his ex-wife or young son and is comfortably established as a perpetual bachelor. He meets Tereza, a café waitress in a town he visits, and realises when she follows him to Prague that she intends to "offer him up her life." A determined libertine, he momentarily resists his budding romantic feelings for her, then gives in to his love.
The year is 1968. The protagonist, Tomas, a brilliant Prague surgeon, pursues a philosophy of lightness in his erotic adventures and exploits. Briefly married in the past, he neither sees nor wishes to see his ex-wife or young son and is comfortably established as a perpetual bachelor. He meets Tereza, a café waitress in a town he visits, and realises when she follows him to Prague that she intends to "offer him up her life." A determined libertine, he momentarily resists his budding romantic feelings for her, then gives in to his love.
Tereza had been living a frustrated life as a waitress in a small town, and dreamt of escaping, especially from her vulgar mother. She recognises in Tomas an intellectual and dreamer, and falls in love with him instantly. The two live together, but Tomas is unable to give up his mistresses. For a while he hides his infidelity from Teresa. Eventually he admits to it, but claims that his sexuality is entirely separate from his love for her. Tereza, unable to accept his behaviour or adopt a light attitude towards sex, suffers increasingly from nightmares, and contemplates suicide.
To keep Tereza happy, Tomas marries her. He keeps his mistresses, however, including his closest friend and long-term lover Sabina, a beautiful, reckless, and talented painter. In spite of herself, Tereza is charmed by Sabina's openness and light-heartedness, and the two women grow friendly. Sabina finds Tereza a job in Prague as a photographer. Despite her friendship with Sabina, however, Tereza's jealousy of Tomas does not slacken.
The events of the Prague Spring result in the Soviet military occupation of the city. Tomas, who in the past wrote an article condemning the Czech Communists, is warned to leave. Sabina flees first, and later Tomas and Tereza join her in Switzerland. Tereza, who found some fulfilment in her job as photographer in Prague, realises that in Zurich she is jobless and must sit at home while Tomas continues having affairs. She decides that "when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave," and returns to Prague. Tomas attempts to enjoy his newly recovered freedom for a few days, then gives up and returns to Prague and Tereza. The return truly means giving up freedom—there is no chance that the couple will be allowed to leave again. In Prague, Tomas political troubles escalate. He loses his position as surgeon for refusing to sign a denunciation of his anti-Communist article. Both the Communist regime and underground dissidents attempt to seduce him to their side. His own son reappears as a young dissident and preaches to Tomas with no success, for Tomas hates the idea of being used politically in the same way Sabina hates artistic kitsch. In the end, Tomas seeks obscurity in a job washing windows. His fame persists, however, and he continues seducing the women he works for.
Tereza, now a bartender, in a moment of desperation has an affair with a tall engineer who comes to her bar. She does so in hopes of coming closer to Tomas' way of life; instead she grows more miserable and becomes convinced the man was a police agent hired to gather potential blackmailing material. After many scenes and nightmares, she convinces Tomas to move with her to the country. This means giving up their way of life entirely, and an end to Tomas' erotic adventures.
After living peacefully in the country for some time, Tomas and Tereza are killed one night in a driving accident; they die instantly and together.
In Geneva, Sabina has a love affair with Franz, a university professor and idealistic intellectual who has more in common emotionally with Tereza than Sabina—he imbues his life with heavy meaning. He views Sabina as a romantic and courageous Czech dissident, and is tortured that he must betray his wife Marie-Claude in order to see her. Sabina loves Franz but their views on betrayal differ dramatically; whereas he hates the idea of betrayal, she views betrayal as the first step towards "going off into the unknown," the most glorious thing she can think of.
When Franz leaves his wife and expects to move in with her, Sabina abruptly leaves Switzerland. Sabina leaves Geneva for Paris and then Paris for America; she learns of Tomas and Tereza's deaths from a letter and understands her last link to the past has been broken. She ends up living with an elderly American couple and wondering if she has reached the end of her perpetual flight.
Franz remains separated from his wife. After Sabina's betrayal, he finds consolation with a young student, a girl in over-sized glasses who loves him simply. Franz never accepts that he clearly misunderstood Sabina, but continues to hold her image as in ideal in his head, (wrongly) thinking his decisions in life would have made her proud. At his death, his wife reclaims Franz's body and orders the words "A return after long wanderings" written on his tomb.
Milan Kundera, (born April 1, 1929, Brno, Czechoslovakia [now in Czech Republic]), Czech novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet whose works combine erotic comedy with political criticism and philosophical speculation.
The son of a noted concert pianist and musicologist, Ludvik Kundera, the young Kundera studied music but gradually turned to writing, and he began teaching literature at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Prague in 1952. He published several collections of poetry in the 1950s, including Poslední máj (1955; “The Last May”), an homage to the Communist resistance leader Julius Fučík, and Monology (1957; “Monologues”), a volume of love poems that, because of their ironic tone and eroticism, were later condemned by the Czech political authorities. During his early career he moved in and out of the Communist Party: he joined in 1948, was expelled in 1950, and was readmitted in 1956, remaining a member until 1970. According to an article published in 2008 in a Czech magazine, Kundera in 1950, after his expulsion from the party, informed police in Prague of the presence of a Western intelligence agent, who was then arrested and imprisoned for 14 years. Kundera denied the article’s claims, which were based on a researcher’s discovery of a police report on the arrest.
Several volumes of short stories and a highly successful one-act play, Majitelé klíčů (1962; “The Owners of the Keys”), were followed by his first novel and one of his greatest works, Žert (1967; The Joke), a comic, ironic view of the private lives and destinies of various Czechs during the years of Stalinism; translated into several languages, it achieved great international acclaim. His second novel,Život je jinde (1969; Life Is Elsewhere), about a hapless, romantic-minded hero who thoroughly embraces the Communist takeover of 1948, was forbidden Czech publication. Kundera had participated in the brief but heady liberalisation of Czechoslovakia in 1967–68, and after the Soviet occupation of the country he refused to admit his political errors and consequently was attacked by the authorities, who banned all his works, fired him from his teaching positions, and ousted him from the Communist Party.
In 1975 Kundera was allowed to emigrate (with his wife, Věra Hrabánková) from Czechoslovakia to teach at the University of Rennes (1975–78) in France; in 1979 the Czech government stripped him of his citizenship. In the 1970s and ’80s his novels, including Valčík na rozloučenou(1976; “Farewell Waltz”; Eng. trans. The Farewell Party),Kniha smíchu a zapomnění (1979; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), and Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (1984; The Unbearable Lightness of Being), were published in France and elsewhere abroad but until 1989 were banned in his homeland. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, one of his most successful works, is a series of wittily ironic meditations on the modern state’s tendency to deny and obliterate human memory and historical truth. Nesmrtelnost(1990; Immortality) explores the nature of artistic creation.La Lenteur (1994; Slowness) was the first novel Kundera wrote in French, L’Identité (1997; Identity) his second. Czech émigrés are the central characters of Kundera’s La ignorancia (2000; Ignorance), written in French but first published in Spanish.
Kundera’s wide-ranging reflections appear in L’Art du roman (1986; The Art of the Novel), Les Testaments trahis(1993; Testaments Betrayed), Le Rideau (2005; The Curtain), and Une Rencontre (2009; Encounter).
