Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim, Michael Henry Heim (Translator)Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover—these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.
Synopsis
A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover — these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.
Janet Malcolm
Brilliant . . . A work of high modernist playfulness and deep pathos. —New York Review of Books
Editorials
Janet Malcolm
Brilliant . . . A work of high modernist playfulness and deep pathos. —New York Review of BooksJim Miller
Kundera has raised the novel of ideas to a new level of dreamlike lyricism and emotional intensity. —NewsweekElizabeth Hardwick
Kundera is a virtuoso . . . A work of the boldest mastery, originality, and richness. —Vanity FairPeople Magazine
A meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love...full of telling details, truths large and small.Newsweek
Kundera has raised the novel of ideas to a new level of dream-like lyricism and emotional intensity.Richard Locke
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is both a love story and a novel of ideas.... Witty, seductive, serious... also full of feeling and enormously experienced in the tricky interplay of sex and politics.... One of the finest and most consistently interesting novelists in Europe or America, [Kundera] has a powerful tale to tell.— The Washington Post Book World
Edmund White
Few contemporary writers have succeeded as Kundera has in combining a cool, elegant, formal objectivity with warm, intimate (almost embarrassingly intimate) pictures of the imperfect realities of adult love. Kundera's heroes may be Don Juans, but they are shy, apologetic ones; his women are intensely physical beings, but they are also as quirkily intelligent and stubbornly independent as his men.— The Nation
Frances Taliaferro
A work of large scale and complexity, symphonically arranged... political and philosophical, erotic and spiritual, funny and profound.... There is no wiser observer now writing of the multifarious relations of men and women.... Kundera's intelligence is both speculative and playful. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is his best novel yet.— The Wall Street Journal