4thace reviewed The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Characters behave the way they do for their own reasons
3 stars
I spent most of the time under the impression that I was reading about three-dimensional characters and the choices they were making, but now think this is not the author's intention at all. The characters are there for the author to discuss various ideas, about happiness or relationships or political systems in a creative way. I think part of the reason for the "lightness" of these beings is because as far as we can see they don't really inhabit their world fully. I also thought the story was going to be how the characters' lives were dictated by the failed Prague Spring movement, when in reality the unhappiness and confusion they felt had their real sources in childhood trauma, in modern social values, unrelated to political movements. They do change as their lives go on, but fundamentally the way they view the world remains the same.
When you are …
I spent most of the time under the impression that I was reading about three-dimensional characters and the choices they were making, but now think this is not the author's intention at all. The characters are there for the author to discuss various ideas, about happiness or relationships or political systems in a creative way. I think part of the reason for the "lightness" of these beings is because as far as we can see they don't really inhabit their world fully. I also thought the story was going to be how the characters' lives were dictated by the failed Prague Spring movement, when in reality the unhappiness and confusion they felt had their real sources in childhood trauma, in modern social values, unrelated to political movements. They do change as their lives go on, but fundamentally the way they view the world remains the same.
When you are told about the deaths of the main characters midway through the book it feels like a shock, a foreshadowing of an emotional scene to come, but then the book carries on telling their story and the climactic scene I expected never quite unfolded. The point of these characters isn't to teach us a lesson, just as real people's lives often do not have a single tidy message for us. Despite the flair the author displays in writing about these characters, in a way it ends up depicting the kinds of stories you might see by taking a realistic view of the lives of ordinary people we know.
