Violet wells's Reviews > The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Broadly speaking the power source motoring this novel is the battle between arguably the two most fundamental and often conflictual drives in the human psyche - the desire for commitment and the desire for freedom. Commitment Kundera classes as heaviness; freedom as lightness. "When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. Sabina had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being. Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love were gone - what was left to betray? Sabina felt emptiness all around her. What if that emptiness was the goal of all her betrayals? Naturally she had not realized it until now. How could she have? The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us. Sabina was unaware of the goal that lay behind her longing to betray. The unbearable lightness of being - was that the goal?"


"The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a basis of kitsch." One of my favourite themes explored in the book was the role kitsch plays in our lives. Empathy is often created through kitsch. American cinema knows and exploits this. The tearful reunion at the end of the film makes us feel good about the human race. "It is always nice to dream that we are part of a jubilant throng marching through the centuries..."

Kundera is often at pains to point out we don't respond privately to an experience as we would collectively. "Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing a most incredible sensation. Leafing through a book on Hitler, I was touched by some of his portraits: they reminded me of my childhood. I grew up during the war; several members of my family perished in Hitler's concentration camps; but what were their deaths compared with the memories of a lost period in my life, a period that would never return?" This is not the reaction he ought to be feeling. He's showing us what he privately feels is at odds with the prescribed feeling. And we understand there's often an element of kitsch in the proscribed collective feeling. Because we're pretending we favour the interests of the collective over the personal. "For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies."

But Kundera isn't too hard on kitsch in our personal lives - "She knew only too well that the song was a beautiful lie. As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition." It's the role kitsch plays in politics that gets his back up. "Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements." Of course, it's blatantly apparent how much of political and nationalistic and military theatre is pure kitsch. The Nazis took kitsch to a whole new level. It would be comical to watch now if we didn't know what it led to. A whole nation bamboozled into idiocy by kitsch. "Political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on the fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch." National anthems bring it out - the absurdly stiff posture, the clenched fist on heart. Taking pride in something as random and unearned as nationality is little but hollow posturing when you think about it. Nationality is not something you have achieved after all. It's simply the result of a thrown dice. And the same nationality can evoke an inexhaustible number of different images in any given individual. It's essentially a bogus idea of unity.

Totalitarian regimes include nations which historically denied women equal rights, countries which enforced racial segregation and persecuted homosexuality. "But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears." Which is why women in early 20th century Britain, blacks in America and gays throughout the world were constrained to exaggerate pride in a factor of their lives they had no control over, their sex, their skin colour, their sexuality. And when we see films now about these struggles kitsch is always present. They enable us to feel we are part of the jubilant throng marching through the centuries... Everything is perhaps ultimately turned into kitsch.

This probably isn't quite Kundera's best novel but it's a fabulous and inspiring read for all its wisdom and the playful possibilities of fiction it embraces and dramatizes. "As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself? Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one's own stomach during a moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one's fist with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying one's wit before hidden microphones-I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become."