Milan Kundera ''The unbearable lightness of being'' (Audio Book): Summary and Commentary
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Written in 1982 and published for the first time in France two years later, The Unsustainable Lightness of Being (in Czech: Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí) was published in Italy in 1985 by the Adelphi publishing house in the translation by Giuseppe Dierna (under the pseudonym of Antonio Barbato 1) with the lucky, now proverbial 2 title The unbearable lightness of being.
The book was one of the major literary cases of the 1980s, and continues to have enormous success with the public today, in Italy and around the world. Rightly or wrongly considered Milan Kundera's masterpiece, it is the most successful example of the novel-essay form dear to the Bohemian author, a French citizen since 1981.
SUMMARY
The plot of the novel develops within a philosophical framework. From a reflection of the narrator on the heavy-light opposition, derived from the Parmenidean one between non-being and being, intertwined with the Nietzschean idea of the Eternal Return - therefore another opposition, between repetition and non-existence of the return - comes the first character, Tomáš. Tomáš lives and works as a doctor in Prague. He has a son, born from a failed marriage, with whom he has broken off relations. Since he separated from his wife he has no longer been tied to a single person and has relationships with several women which he himself defines as "erotic friendships". However, the protagonist applies a strict personal rule to these relationships: never sleep together.
Following a series of coincidences, in a small town in Bohemia Tomáš meets a barmaid, Tereza. After the man's departure, Tereza decides to leave home and work and join him in Prague. She shows up at her house, they make love. During the trip, however, Tereza fell ill with the flu: this new coincidence forces her to move in with Tomáš, who thus has to violate the same rule as her. Together they get a dog, they call her Karenin in memory of the book that Tereza kept with her when she arrived, namely Anna Karenina. Thus begins their love story.
In Prague, the woman becomes a photographer and she begins a new life away from her mother, with whom she has always had a tormented relationship. Following the Soviet invasion of August 1968, which closed the experience of the "Prague Spring" 3, or the attempt at liberation from the communist regime established in Czechoslovakia after the Second World War, the two fled to Switzerland, to Zurich, where they then return to the capital - first she and then him, chasing her - where Tomáš loses his job, due to the publication of a writing on Oedipus which he refuses to retract in front of the communist authorities.
Tomas and Tereza's love is asymmetrical: they are spiritually faithful to each other, but he, without her being able to accept it, continues to have relationships with other women. One of these is Sabina, a painter, with whom Tereza becomes friends despite her jealousy. Sabina also leaves Prague, to escape to Geneva. There, the artist begins a relationship with Franz, a married university professor, who at a certain point confesses his betrayal to his wife, Marie-Claude, resulting in him losing both women. However, the confession also has a positive effect: it suddenly frees him from the relational and professional patterns and conventions in which his existence had become rigid.
The developments of their stories and the political situation of the country finally lead the four characters to move away: Sabina moves to America, where she will be able to maintain her social and sentimental freedom; Franz in Cambodia, joining a humanitarian mission during which he will find his death; Tereza and Tomáš in a countryside location, pursuing the desire for a peaceful and secluded life, far from politics and the threat of other women. There, the two protagonists, after losing Karenin, who fell ill with cancer, will become victims of a banal car accident.
COMMENT
Better than his other works, The Unbearable Lightness of Being concentrates and lends itself to exemplifying the primary characteristics of Milan Kundera's narrative writing, his "art of the novel". First of all, the form of the novel-essay, which finds its most convincing and successful expression in this book, and which will be confirmed in all subsequent narrative texts, for example in Immortality (1990), but especially in those of the French period.
With the form of the novel-essay, Kundera finds an alternative and at the same time a solution to the narrative models of the past: from the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel to Modernism and the historical avant-gardes up to the proposals of the neo-avant-garde. In the case of Kundera, by "solution" we must also mean "synthesis": the style of the Czech writer combines the faithful representation of places, characters and actions with a non-chronological temporal progression, with leaps into the past or future and repetitions of scenes already narrated but from a different point of view; the author-narrator, clearly external to the facts, does not completely control his characters nor is he able to fully explain their thoughts, words, actions, which he rather comments on as if he were a pure spectator.
The essay passages, largely of a philosophical nature, and the narrative passages alternate without an apparent pattern along the sequence of short numbered chapters-paragraphs that make up the parts of the novel. If the non-fiction passages retain a plain, narrative style, conversely the narrative passages often present a rational, didactic, demonstrative tone.
