The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Could they have been hand in hand all night?”

It’s been sitting in the bookcase for five years, an eighteenth birthday present from my art teacher (somehow the present from that year from my English teacher, Madame Bovary, got read right away) and I wouldn’t have picked it up if a friend hadn’t recommended it. I didn’t expect to like it, to be truthful, but I actually am quite grateful that I read it.

The situation itself may be the most banal of all—basically, the love lives of four people—but the style is anything but conventional. Frequently Kundera drops in highly philosophical passages that I find difficult to stomach in large doses. There is also a sense of the writerliness of it all, as Kundera often refers to himself and how he chose his characters and what scenes best encapsulate them. But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself? (I would agree with this!) Kundera seems to be something of a linguist, noting the different in the etymologies between the romance connotation of “pity” and the Czech one—his character Tomas suffers from his “compassion (that curse of emotional telepathy)” but in Czech this is not considered to be a fault. It’s also a rather political novel (about Prague and the Communist takeover, of which I know pretty much nothing). Its message, though, is certainly not a pious one either--“What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse.” It’s no surprise that it’s not told in a linear fashion.

However, what makes it so great is that it makes so much sense. Here are boiled down the truths of our relationships with those of the opposite sex, our lovers and friends and how different genders and different backgrounds can be huge stumbling blocks toward our understanding of one another. Not to mention the sex part. My favorite part of the book was the Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words. Sabina, a Czech artist, comes from a completely different perspective than Franz, her Swiss lover, which leads to misunderstandings that aren’t consciously their faults. Over such concepts as cemeteries, strength, and New York. I recently read a sort of quasi-academic, quasi-self-help book about communication gaps between the sexes, and while that book relied on the more scientific, this list of misunderstood words between Sabina and Franz is a brilliant corollary. I suppose we could take it in a really depressed fashion, ie, we’ll never understand each other so why try—but I feel like it’s an exhortation to talk to each other, to talk these differences out.

There were so many parts I felt myself going “ah yes” to. I think it must appeal that way to most. “We can never know what we want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.” “Vertigo is . . . the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.” I found myself identifying with both of the female characters. Sabina is Tomas’ lover intermittently; early in the book he feels she understands him best. “Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown” is Sabina’s take. Though she causes a rather long-winded section on Kundera’s part about the meaning of kitsch, I feel in that section I really know her--“ ‘My enemy is kitsch, not Communism!’ she replied”—I feel she could exist as a real person. Meanwhile, Tomas really likes going to bed with women. He spends most of his life, a bit like Florentino Ariza I must confess, sleeping quite joyfully and without compunction or ties with around two hundred women. The nature of his love with Tereza is ever-changing. He leaves Zurich to be with her, even if it means never leaving Czechoslovakia again.

Tereza is rather fascinating because she’s so messed up. Her mother has treated her truly appallingly and, through a series of coincidences, she feels Tomas is her savior and goes pretty much directly from fleeing her mother’s house to moving with Tomas to Zurich. She hears Beethoven upon first meeting him: “If love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.” She is bookish and probably a Taurus like me, because she’s “loyal, dependable, and warm-hearted” (as well as “possessive and jealous”). Tereza needs affection--“Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved.” Even though Tomas’ liaisons with other women drive her crazy, she stays with him. Whether that’s the right thing to do I can’t say, but I empathize in this situation: “ ‘You mean you were really jealous?’ she asked him ten times or more, incredulously, as though someone had just informed her she had been awarded a Nobel Prize.”

The end of the novel is necessarily quite bleak, even as Tereza and Tomas realize their love for each other. Tereza realizes that her love for their dog Karenin is the kind (she thinks) she should have had for Tomas all along: selfless, unconditional, not worrying about whether he loves her “enough.” Again, I’m not certain this is necessarily the “right” attitude to take, but often we get so caught up in this attitude with our loved ones: do they love us more than we love them? Why can’t they love us as much as we love them?—we forget that love is love! Just open the heart up and let it flow, though I suppose the book makes the point that’s not easy—in fact, it could practically destroy you. (And I admit I got teary-eyed during the dog’s death.)

The book has a reputation for being a bit on the overly erotic side, but I didn’t really find it to be. It was certainly frank about all matters, sexual or otherwise, but not the bodice-ripper reputation I think it has. The blurbs on the back of the book were extolling it, and I’m glad I finally saw for myself what all the fuss was about. Actually the book probably has a lot in common with Love in the Time of Cholera, but I’ll have to wait and see if that book’s ending is quite as depressing.