book review: the unbearable lightness of being by milan kundera
sooooo. i’m back. hello to my 5 subscribers! love u guys. abandoned substack for a year, always intended to write, never did. i want to try to start regular posts, short and sweet. this review isn’t exactly spoiler free so be warned.
kundera’s somewhat strange, existential novel, opens with a proposition of nietzsche’s eternal return:
“The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?”
he ties this idea to parmenides’s discussion of opposites, specifically lightness/weight. this is the focal theme of the book.
in these mere 300 pages, milan kundera attempts to look into and onto human existence as it plays out in the grand stage of eternity. not as a quantized experience, but rather as a succession of events, as mankind's journey; making history into a collective. a collective that repeats, that is, forever and always, and yet man is doomed never to know this repetition, and never to learn from it. kundera posits: events past gain ultimate lightness, as they are done, over, and never to return, making them into mere ideas, light and floating away as feathers.
“Somewhere out in space there was a planet where all people would be born again. They would be fully aware of the life they had spent on earth and of all the experience they had amassed here. And perhaps there was still another planet, where we would all be born a third time with the experience of our first two lives. And perhaps there were yet more and more planets where mankind would be born one degree (one life) more mature. That was Tomas’s version of eternal return. Of course we here on earth (planet number one, the planet of inexperience) can only fabricate vague fantasies of what will happen to man on those other planets. Will he be wiser? Is maturity within man’s power? Can he attain it through repetition? Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification. An optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise.”
the twin signs of lightness and weight are exhibited in the novel by the two main women: tereza, who is married to tomas, and sabina, one of his mistresses and friends.
tereza characterizes lightness going to, becoming, weight. her upbringing is described as torturously light, her mother stripping all things tereza holds sacred (the body, privacy, the soul) of their meaning, of weight. tereza escapes this unbearably light childhood and becomes heavy, entering the intellectual world through books. over and over throughout the novel kundera chooses to emphasize the heaviness she brings with her: “She came with a heavy suitcase. She left with a heavy suitcase.”
sabina on the other hand is heaviness becoming light. her father was a limiting figure to her, and she seeks to betray her upbringing as she enters the adult world. this motif of betrayal accompanies her throughout her life, as do other recurring motifs: such is her nature. sabina is unable to view things in a vacuum, to her everything holds a history, like the bowler hat, like cemeteries. but her story is one of lightness, that is what she is drawn to, although every once in a while weight calls to her again: “Sabina’s path of betrayals would continue elsewhere, and from the depths of her being, a silly, mawkish song about two shining windows and the happy family living behind them would occasionally make its way into the unbearable lightness of being.”
the author explores the main thematic duality through the lens of love and lust, the former being heavy and the latter being light. through tomas’s eyes, he ties tereza to weight and sabina to lightness. this, however, is where a slight issue with the book arises. the two women seem to lose some of their depth, becoming too closely tied to their respective amorous themes. it seems at times that kundera even reduces them to the trite and easy-to-fall-into trap of the madonna/whore complex, which seems to plague male writers… they just can’t seem not to write it into their books!
kundera’s astute, sometimes alarmingly intimate understanding of mankind, of language, of movements, and relationships, makes this book truly special. on every single page, there is a witticism, an observation, a gut-punch sentiment that leaves you reeling. here are some ideas that i have continued coming back to over and over after reading.
language
i’m a nascent linguaphile, and don’t have much to say except that i think the way the author played around with words and their meaning (or lack thereof) was clever and enjoyable. A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words comes to mind.
shit
the short few pages describing the death of stalin’s son as a result of shit are without a doubt one of the most successfully concise descriptions of the existential condition. (i understand why tiktok people call this book ‘baby’s first existentialism’.) there really isn’t much for me to add here, it’s all written so beautifully by kundera already.
“If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if the Son of God can undergo judgment for shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light.”
the post-WWII despair, the destruction of all ideals, the unmasking of the cruelty of the universe… love it!
the grand march, kitsch, and leftists
kundera introduces kitsch through sabina as a condition of man where we must unify all human experience under thematic banners — we must narrative-ize. he says: “Since opinions vary, there are various kitsches: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Communist, Fascist, democratic, feminist, European, American, national, international.”
(am i crazy or does kitsch = core… like hopecore, blueberry milk nails core, clean girl core, the ever elusive corecore. we just gotta make everything an aesthetic. it’s comforting to think that this condition, which i assumed rose to prominence along with social media/the internet/the digital panopticon, has actually been around forever.)
he characterizes leftist kitsch as a Grand March, which franz is fascinated by, a sort of heroic journey that mankind is making towards “brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness.” it matters not what the way is: “The dictatorship of the proletariat or democracy? Rejection of the consumer society or demands for increased productivity? The guillotine or an end to the death penalty?” leftism is just the adherence to the grand march kitsch, methods notwithstanding.
more than any other existentialist work or analysis of leftism, this idea (one based on historical narrative rather than momentary observation) has destabilized my faith in the grand march. as a leftist myself i found this a scathing yet forgiving take, which shook my unerring hard-line morals more than other existential pieces.
sooo many things i didn’t touch on, so many ideas i could go on and on about…
at this point, i can’t even remember what i wanted to end with so i will leave you with the closing words of the book:
“Tomas turned the key and switched on the ceiling light. Tereza saw two beds pushed together, one of them flanked by a bedside table and lamp. Up out of the lampshade, startled by the overhead light, flew a large nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room. The strains of the piano and violin rose up weakly from below.”