THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING By Milan Kundera. Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim.
314 pages
New York: Perennial Classics, 1999 (from 1984 original)
ISBN: 0-06-093213-9 Comments by Bob Corbett
October 2001 A touching and sad novel, at once a compelling love story, philosophical text, and dialogue with Frederich Nietzsche The Unbearable Lightness of Being is all of these and more, perhaps most importantly a manifesto of embracing nihilism. Milan Kundera opens the novel with a discourse on Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal recurrence. He rejects any view of the recurrence as being real or metaphysical. It is metaphorical he assures us. In a world of objective meaninglessness one must fall into nihilism unless one acts as if one's acts recur eternally, thus giving our acts "weight," the weight of those choices we make, as though recurring eternally, living forever. Kundera rejects Nietzsche's optimism and in compelling detail and poignancy he give us the story of the painful love affair of Tomas and Tereza, condemned by fate and choice to live together, yet never ceasing to cause each other enormous pain and suffering. Tomas, a surgeon living in Prague just before the famous 1968 Spring uprising, is an incorrigible womanizer, unable to resist his unending stream of meaningless sexual flings. Tereza is drawn to him, sent to him by fate, like Moses in a bulrush basket. Tomas' constant infidelities numb her with pain; yet her unending love and need draw her to him inexorably, and he to her. From the text of a Beethoven composition he takes the line: "Es muss Sein" (it must be). He even leaves the safety of Switzerland to follow her back to Prague, sealing their fate to that oppressive regime following the Russian takeover. | |
|
