The Unbearable Lightness of Being  (English, Paperback, Kundera Milan)

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being brings out the defects of adult love and how some irrevocable choices affect people and their destinies.

Summary Of The Book

This book, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, has been written in the backdrop of the Soviet occupation of Prague during 1968. It revolves mainly around two women and two men. The story is written in a philosophical vein touching upon the lifestyle of artists and intellectuals in the society of those days. Tomas, one of the main characters, is a surgeon and a womanizer who has a stormy relationship with his wife, Tereza.

He is also in love with Sabina who is an artist. While Tereza, who is a photographer is very unhappy with her unfaithful husband, Franz, a Swiss university professor, who is also in love with Sabina. Franz is very noble and faithful but is in danger of losing everything that he stands for. The other characters in the story include Simon, the son of Tomas from a previous marriage, and a dog.

The author has attempted to bring out the predicament of the main protagonists who are struggling to get to grips with the purpose of their lives and to rebuild their careers.

About Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera, born on April 1, 1929, is the most recognized living writer of Czech Republic.

Some of his other books include The Book of Laughter And Forgetting, The Joke, Laughable Loves, Immortality, and Ignorance.

Since 1975, he has lived in exile in France and has become its naturalized citizen since 1981. Kundera has written books in both French and Czech. He studied aesthetics and literature at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague. He modifies the French translations of all his books, therefore these are considered as original works not translations. The Communist regimes of Czechoslovakia banned his books until the Velvet Revolution in 1989 when the regime was brought down.