Milan Kundera (1929–2023)

If you don’t know much about Poland, Hungary, or Czechia, that’s probably not your fault. It’s likely due to Europe’s abandonment of these countries during their occupation by the Soviets after World War II. That’s what Czech novelist Milan Kundera argues in the stirring essays collected in this volume. Called by the nebulous name of “Central Europe,” the area that fell into Russian clutches in the Communist era was by no means some bridge to the East, but rather the last show more outpost of the West, linked to Germany, France, and the rest by a shared Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman heritage, and allegiance to Enlightenment rationality. “Western Europe” can’t recognize that link, Kundera says, because it, too, has lost its connection to that past. show less

Some dreams you can’t wake from. They’re too real, all too real. Chantal and Jean-Marc love each other. At least they love a version of each other. Whether that version is the real one is the question that confronts them. Their search for the answer turns into a series of misunderstandings, whose increasingly bizarre nature blurs the line between dreams and waking life. It’s unclear by the end what was dreamt and what experienced, but one thing is apparent: the distinction matters, and show more anyone who tells you otherwise has designs on you. Some dreams you can’t wake from, no, but it’s better to die trying than accept them as reality. show less

Appropriately described on its jacket as "a novel of ideas," The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the story of three people simultaneously caught up in the messes of their own lives and those of the world around them. Told by an intrusive narrator primarily interested in using the characters in his self-acknowledged novel to demonstrate the arbitrary nature of life, the story alternates between the surgeon Tomas, his wife Tereza, and his mistress Sabina as they live through the fallout of show more the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring.

The novel's central character is Tomas; however, its seven parts tell and retell a few central events from different character's perspectives, with each retelling providing key details that changes the reader's understanding of the event's significance. Tomas is the epicenter of two ménages à trois, the one between himself, Tereza and Sabina; the other with Sabina and her married lover, Franz. In addition, his libido is insatiable, as evidenced by the myriad other women he sleeps with throughout the novel while attempting to prove love and sex are distinct. His pursuit subsumes his marriage, leading Tereza to return to the country they fled, with disastrous consequences for all.

Although Tomas finds happiness in the end, it comes only after he has lost his career and become a non-entity. In keeping with the narrator's worldview, this happiness is short-lived and does not extend to the woman he supposedly loves. show less

Kundera’s third novel is a hymn to lyrical poetry, revolutionary passions and youthful testosterone. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven,” and all that, although it turns out that the young Wordsworth (and Goethe) are among the few poets not to be channeled by Kundera’s young hero, Jaromil. And it isn’t hard to see why — they had the bad taste to go on to become old men.

And of course this is Kundera, so there is a heavy layer of irony going show more on. Youth is a time of great clumsiness, self-doubt and acne as well as of great energy, beauty and passion; lyrical poetry usually mixes the trite with the profound in its grand images; first love is often in so much of a hurry to get its rocks off that it picks the wrong object; revolutions (not least the Czechoslovak one of 1948) mix in a good deal of petty revenge, bureaucratic dogmatism and political pragmatism with all the youthful idealism and passion; and even the most romantic poetic gesture of all, the early grave, can have more than its fair share of bathos.

This is all very clever and often funny, but you do sometimes get the feeling that the author is taking unfair advantage of the situation to indulge his own fantasies and write in an unnecessary number of sex-scenes — particularly as none of the female characters in the book have names or more than a minimal capacity to act independently of men. Admittedly, the men don’t have names either (other than Jaromil, his dream alter-ego Xavier, and various real-life Dead Poets), but they do seem to be able to act independently, and don’t spend all their time being undressed. show less