Boring. Too much sex. Too much pretentiousness. ( )

Such a gorgeously written and wonderfully brilliant book. ( )

Not unbearable but not very light either. ( )

Before I'd read 50 pages of this book, I realized it was more about ideas than about character, setting, or plot. These ideas were presented through two couples: Tomas and Tereza; Franz and Sabina. The men were philanderers, sleeping with many different women and thinking nothing of it. The women were just "there," existing only in relationship to the men. And the ideas? I am afraid I just didn't "get" what Kundera was trying to say. I don't shy away from ideas: I enjoy thinking, debate, and reading that introduces me to new concepts. But this book just didn't do it for me. There were, however, a couple of interesting passages.

The first half of the book provided insight to the title:
- Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. he saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness? (p 5)
- And Sabina -- what had come over her? Nothing ... Her drama was not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being. (p. 122)

And I found a couple of nuggets worth pondering:
- Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. (p.51)
- From that time on she had known that beauty is a world betrayed. The only way we can encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somewhere. (p. 110)

But that's about it. I guess this just wasn't my cup of tea. ( )

Set in communist run Czechoslovakia spanning the 1960s to 1980s, while speaking to the contemporary ear, this is the story of four people in four interconnected relationships. Their world is caught between the demands of society and state, and love and politics. A world where existence loses its substance and weight within "the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return". Kundera’s themes of repetition and weight are quite deep, along with his unusual way of unfolding the positives and negatives of fidelity and betrayal. Read this book more than once. ( )