Kundera deftly forges empathy for his characters’ trails and decisions. The internal life of characters and their relationships are strained and morphed by the Soviet invasion and the surveillance state installed in its wake. Set throughout Europe during the late-1960s and early-1970’s, the primary focus of The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the Prague Spring of 1968 in Czechoslovakia. It is a rich and complicated novel that is at once a love story, a metaphysical treatise, a political commentary, a psychological study, a lesson on kitsch, a. Still grappling with the effects of World Wars I and II, and set in the midst of the Cold War, a reader gains an acute sense of being caught between forces that are imminently larger and more powerful than any individual can imagine or influence. Kundera’s extra-story explorations never deviate from the story, but compliment and inform the setting, characters and a reader’s understanding(s) of the whole story. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Czech: Nesnesiteln lehkost byt) is a 1984 novel by Milan Kundera, about two women, two men, a dog, and their lives in the 1968 Prague Spring period of Czechoslovak history. All of this is fun and enlightening for me. John Barth is one writer who comes to mind as having explored the possibilities of this strategy, and the distinguished Czech novelist Milan Kundera in his new.

Kundera even breaks the fourth wall at times, acknowledging that his characters are literary constructs and openly wonders about the purpose of novels and why authors are compelled to write them. The book touches on many philosophical themes – an evaluation of Nietzsche and Parmenides kicks off the novel, and questions of morality and duty are discussed throughout. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera has been on my radar for some time now – more than one patron has recommended it while we chatted about our respective tastes – and after years of putting it off, I finally got around it.

With a summer term of schooling underway and a keen sense that Metadata: 2 nd Edition is not the most enthralling book, I needed a summer read that would provide an escape from academic toil.

The unbearable lightness of being book