The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Book, 1984; Movie, 1988, R


Premise - Explore the lives of four individuals and their dog during the Soviet Union occupancy in Prague. What does it mean to be an individual? To be significant? To have a body? To be? To have a soul? To be human? To love? Perhaps the biggest question of all is what happens to ourselves when we really start to think about these questions

Review -When I first read this novel for a literature class in college, I cried endlessly. A few years later, visiting Prague and bringing the book along to reread, I still cried quite a bit. This is one of my favorite novels of all time for its intellectual contributions, but it definitely plays with your feels just as much as your intellect.

Because the book generally lacks a plot, and the plot that it does have isn’t written in chronological order, the few years I spent in between my initial reading and my most recent one completely eradicated any memory I had of this book. All I remembered were the characters’ names (Tomas, Tereza, Sabina, Franz, and Karenin), as well as the fact that (spoiler) THE DOG FREAKIN’ DIES (and yes, that’s the part that always makes me cry). Most of all, what I remembered was how much I loved the book, even if I couldn’t remember why. 

Re-reading the book, listening to the audiobook, and watching the film version solidified everything I thought I remembered. I truly believe this to be one of the greatest novels ever written. There’s sex and romance and war and politics and animals and death and everything that could possibly be emotionally appealing. Every sentence is poetic, and there is a musical quality to the overall structure. The complexity of each character and the insight Kundera provides readers is beyond profound, not to mention the varying relationships between the characters. I should also mention that part of the novel is written from the dog’s perspective and I was dying from the cute. I can’t recall any writer ever understanding the psyche of a dog that well.

The literature class that required me to read this novel was titled “Music and Poetry,” which is ironic because a novel is neither. But that is precisely why we read this novel in particular – as I mentioned, the novel is its own kind of music. There are different sections/movements, repeated motifs/phrases, and different character ranges that perhaps are the instrumentation. The class required me to keep a very informal daily writing log, and I went a dug up what I had written. Informal as that was, my writing was much more practiced then than it is now, so rather than try to ramble some new thoughts together, here are a sample of some blurbs I had written years ago:

[In both Art of the Novel and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera describes “vertigo” as the longing to fall the higher you go. It is the dizzying need to give into weakness. Tereza is a character who “is in a constant state of vertigo” (61), and finally gives into it when she moves back to Prague from Zurich. The pressure to give into her weakness is caused by the imbalance in Tomas and Tereza’s relationship. Her dependence on him, and his independence from her, comparatively makes her the weak one. The more infidelity Tomas commits, the weaker Tereza becomes. Even worse for Tereza, she is dependent on Tomas in several ways other than the fact that he is her sole sexual partner. With Tomas’s doctor profession, Tereza has the freedom to decline photography jobs she does not want and uses his money. When they live in Zurich, she is completely dependent on him for company because she has no friends or colleagues in the area. Her weakness is dizzying like vertigo. However, vertigo is also its strongest when yearning to “go higher.” In Tereza’s case, that means being an independent. This is also stifled by Tomas when Tereza is one of many women he has sex with. All of this makes Tomas a strong origin of Tereza’s vertigo.]

[After reading parts 1 and 2 of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I made a few predictions about future parts that had the same titles (Lightness and Weight, Soul and Body). I thought that the themes would be the same but the characters different. I was wrong about the characters. I realized that the “Lightness and Weight” parts correspond to Tomas’s perspective, and “Soul and Body” to Tereza’s. It is perhaps like having a repeated melody in music. I was correct, however, in saying that the “tempos” of the novel were the same in the corresponding parts, and that the themes would be the same, giving it a musical quality. However, while the corresponding parts did touch upon the same subjects (ie, the duality between soul and body), they did so in a different way at a later time in the characters’ lives. For instance, now Tereza is testing her belief in the duality of soul and body by having purely physical sex, only to find her soul similarly vulnerable afterwards.]

[Today in class you asked us to identify a specific, recurring motif or metaphor and begin to understand exactly the way it functions in the novel. Tomas is the one who believes metaphors are dangerous, but one he uses regularly when with mistresses is the thought of dissecting them with an imaginary scalpel. This relates to the themes of soul and body, even though that parts of the novel told from Tomas’s point of view are primarily called “Lightness and Weight.” Similar to Tereza’s mother, Tomas sees all bodies as primarily the same. However, Tomas believes in an entirely unique one millionth part to everyone, and that one millionth can only be discovered during sex. He uses a scalpel in the sense that he is “splitting open” women, putting them in their most vulnerable physical and emotional state. He can use this imaginary scalpel to see what women normally hide. For a real scalpel, this would be organs. For an imaginary scalpel it is, for example, the look on a woman’s face during orgasm. The term “scalpel” objectifies the woman into a surgical object. For Tomas, it shows how he treats sexual intercourse as almost educational, and not related to love. Scalpels are also sharp and intrusive. By using a scalpel, he weakens the women, and empowers himself with his private knowledge. While this particular metaphor is used sparingly in the novel, it’s a variation of the same themes of imbalance of power between Tomas and Tereza and Tomas’s distinction between love and sex, and thereby soul and body.

[A previous entry discussed the significance of Tereza’s vertigo and how it is the compulsion to fall. When the concept is first introduced, Kundera mostly describes it as a feeling of weakness, where Tereza longs to fall because she cannot separate herself any further from her mother. Later in the novel, the concept of vertigo makes a return in Yakov Stalin. Tereza, a generally compassionate character, seems odd to compare to a Stalin, but they both feel the same overwhelming sensation. He died by running into an electric fence, a sign of giving into his weakness, or vertigo. When Kundera brings the term back here, he elaborates more on its cause. Simply speaking, Kundera’s vertigo is the extremes of the world, high and low for instance, crumbling inwards, forcing a recognition of the insignificance, or lightness, of everything. For Yakov, it was God and man, in a sense. For being the son of Stalin, he was treated like a God, yet trapped in a cell where he spread his own feces over the wall, as the lowest kind of man. This is a variation of Tereza’s vertigo caused by the overlap of soul and body, where feces has to be considered in the same realm as love. As these two extremes exist simultaneously the world “loses its dimensions” (244), causing the vertigo. Kundera uses two seemingly unconnected characters and connects them through this one word.]

[If we are constantly changing our life, or trying to move it forward, we are not happy with the way things are. Therefore Kundera describes happiness as “the longing for repetition”. We are our happiest if there is nothing we would wish to change, and life becomes circular rather than a straight line. Karenin, the dog, is also described as being in a state of repetition. Changes to routine upset him, such as the moving from Prague to Zurich and back. In this way, Karenin is ultimately happier than his masters. Part 7 of the novel is titled, “Karenin’s smile,” referring to his will to live if he gets to do the routines he loves most, like playing with Tomas for his roll. Kundera also says that “animals were not expelled from Paradise” (the Garden of Eden), in the way humans were, maintaining their innocence (298). If Kundera believes that animals are happier than humans, does this mean he believes they are better off? On the next page he says “Dogs do not have many advantages over people” (299). Perhaps happiness is not the best thing in the world. While dogs and cats may long for repetition, they lack control. Karenin’s life is completely at the mercy of his masters. He looks to Tereza for meaning, and she is the one who instills their routines. Whether or not animals or humans have it better, I still don’t know. However, while humans still have the ability to move forward, a relationship with an animal can remind them of the value of the idyllic, where one feels bliss in repetition.]

There are so many more entries than the ones I had listed here, and so many more possible themes, motifs, key phrases/terms to discuss. Moreover, I wrote a several page essay breaking down the characters of Tomas, Tereza, and Sabina (as well as several more pages of revisions) titled “The Consciousness of Composition” that placed them on a spectrum of those who actively compose their lives, or rely on fortuities. Even with all I had to write on these topics, I think inevitably the novel comes down to two dichotomies: lightness vs. weight, and God vs. shit (also known as soul vs. body, but I think God vs. shit is an even broader and more extreme opposite). Perhaps the biggest question is which side of each dichotomy should humans prefer? Also very importantly, what happens when the two sides of such an extreme dichotomy (i.e. God and shit) come together in something known as man? The realization of the mutual exclusiveness of the two is what causes what Kundera (or at least his English translator) calls vertigo.

To touch briefly on the film version, I would simply say that I’m glad I saw it once but see little value in a repeat viewing. To see visualizations of the characters was heartwarming, most especially in Tomas who is the hardest to empathize with for me in the novel. I am familiar with Daniel Day Lewis as an actor, but had not actually seen any of his work until this film and truly thought it was one of the greatest, most charismatic performances I had ever seen (not to say he romanticized Tomas, he understood him flaws and all). Other than watching the character actors, this is a story that is extraordinarily difficult to transfer from novel to film. I perhaps thought the filmmakers would change or eliminate the majority of the plot, but try to at least get the essence of the characters and thematic points. Instead, I felt as though the film included nearly all of the plot, sometimes unnecessarily, and eliminated the deeper meaning of each scene and interaction. This is especially problematic when you consider that the novel doesn’t really have a compelling plot to begin with. At the same time, I can see why they did that because talking on film about what it means to be human through dialogue, as opposed to some omnipresent narrator, may have come off as overly pretentious. I know that Kundera did contribute to the project, and the film critically did well, but Kundera also acknowledged that the book and film are very separate, and the film is not an accurate representation of the novel’s meaning nor the characters. He also never adapted another one of his works. The other thing about the film is that is the book is already quite sexual, but it is WAY more sexual to see a lot of these events in a visual format. I take absolutely no issue with this, except for the fact that the ratio of naked female bodies to naked male bodies is a little off-putting. Thematically, it makes sense for Tomas to be examining these naked women. But we never really see Tomas naked. The extreme imbalance just felt like a way to titillate audiences and the filmmakers. Still, though, I cried when the dog Karenin died. Forever will.

I would love to include my entire essay (6000+ words) that eyyy got me a 4.0 in the class, but this already seems ridiculously long for an internet post. (99/100).


Quote - I have a couple favorites that I have saved, namely:

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.”
“Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”  

“If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if Son of God can undergo judgment of shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light.”

“This symmetrical composition – the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end – may seem quite ‘novelistic’ to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as ‘fictive,’ ‘fabricated,’ and ‘untrue to life’ into the word ‘novelistic.’ Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.”

“Yes, if you’re looking for infinity, just close your eyes!”

What to watch for - In the film version, Daniel Day Lewis 10000%

If you liked this book, it's hard to recommend anything remotely similar that could possibly do it justice! Though to gain more insight into Kundera's writing, I'd recommend his book The Art of the Novel.

Written by Milan Kundera
American translation by Michael Henry Heim
Published by Harper Perennial
Film directed by Philip Kaufman
Distributed by Orion Pictures