The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

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In a word: sensual

In a sentence: Two couples create an immaculate allegory of Nietzsche and Parmenides, lightness and weight.

Synopsis: Kundera explores the philosophical implications of lightness and weight in a variety of human forms, most notably exploration, betrayal, dependency, and worship. His allegorical examinations are ripped through the backdrop of Russian-occupied Czechoslovakia like the best of Sabina’s paintings.

Reactions: Those who parade works like The Alchemist and The Life of Pi as the great contemporary allegorical works without mention of The Unbearable Lightness of Being are doing all who heed them an inarticulable disservice. The most poignant works of all are those that linger in the back of the mind and leave a tint on the way the reader examines their world. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is one of those works.

Kundera has absolutely mastered the allegorical form, seamlessly weaving the mournful narrative of four lovers at the peak of Czech occupation by Russia with pin-sharp universal truths of the human psyche and the pendulum swing between lightness and weight.

For all 314 pages I thought about the novel incessantly. The introduction sets up the question: if in all natural dichotomies –light and dark, good and evil, morning and night– there also dwells a natural polarity, which is the positive and which is the negative among lightness and weight? We are inclined to describe negative occurrences in terms of oppressive weight which would lead first glance to apply to it the negative pole. However, in human experience great sorrow can only exist after and in relation to an experience of incredible joy. The weight of emotion therefore is the greatest pain and greatest ecstasy of the human condition. And so enters The Unbearable Lightness of Being to turn the reader’s initial inclination on its head, making for a fascinating, introspective, careful read.

Read if: you enjoy a holistic examination of human experience through a philosophical lens.