Reading this book was an amazing experience! The main story revolves around 3 couples: Tomas (an incurable womanizer) and his loving wife Tereza, the same Tomas and his mistress Sabina (an aimless artist), and Sabina with Franz. (a moody and indecisive professor)

“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.”

As the story unfolds the author pauses frequently to contemplate intriguing philosophical questions. The motif is The Difficult Resolution: whether people should be weighted down by meaningful and responsible living or act freely, carelessly, but ultimately with no consequences on the world around them.

“The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they are. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, […] his movements as free as they are insignificant.”

“What shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

Perhaps ironically, all important resolutions in the life of the characters, all irrevocable decisions with profound consequences are done in a careless blink of a second.

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.”

The central setting of the novel is Prague in the spring of 1968 when the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia to halt their attempts of political liberalization. Telling the story of this agitated period, Kundera has numerous occasions to contemplate on the absurdity of the communist regime.

“the [communist] regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.”

”[…] theory of socialist art: The Soviet society had made such progress that the basic conflict was no longer between good and evil but between good and better. So shit (that is, whatever is essentially unacceptable) could exist only on the other side (in America, for instance), and only from there, from the outside, as something alien (a spy, for instance), could it penetrate the world of good and better.”

This was a tremendous novel and some of its questions kept me thinking long after closing the book. I really enjoyed the style and I’ll definitely look into more writings by Milan Kundera.