Andrew Blackman

I’ve listed Milan Kundera as one of my favourite authors for a while now, but oddly I’d never read his most famous book until now. It was definitely no letdown – the same philosophical style I’ve come to expect, but sustained over a longer time and with characters that I felt closer to than in other books I’ve read by him.

The story is of Tomas and Tereza, and whether they will stay together despite Tomas’s constant infidelity. Branching out from this central story are other stories, following the lives, for example, of Tomas’s mistress Sabina and her new lover Franz. The central theme is explored through the lives of the various characters. Is it better to be light or heavy? Lives full of responsibility and attachment are heavy and burdensome, but “closer to the earth”, “more real and truthful.” Lives that are light contain no burdens and allow a person to soar,  “his movements as free as they are insignificant”.

Sabina abandons her family and everyone who means anything to her, and ends up in America selling her paintings, making money, doing well and feeling empty. She has no burdens, no attachments, no real meaning or purpose. She composes a will saying she wants to be cremated and her ashes scattered on the winds. “She wanted to die under the sign of lightness”. Tomas, on the other hand, chooses heaviness. He has opportunities to escape from his burdens – he gets out of Czechoslovakia and is living in Vienna, for example, but goes back to find Tereza. He loses his job as a doctor because of writing an article critical of the regime, and is offered several chances at redemption by renouncing his article. But he chooses not to, and so his life becomes harder and harder, heavier and heavier.

By the end of the book, the heavier life comes to seem preferable, to me anyway. It has more sorrow, but that’s because there is more to care about. Lightness, the absence of ties or emotional attachments, is easier on the surface, but ultimately meaningless, and therefore unbearable.

Apart from the main thematic development, there were some wonderful side discussions. I loved the way he talked about “kitsch”, for example. I only new “kitsch” as meaning “bad taste” or “cheesy”, but Kundera uses a very different definition, from the original German so he says: “kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.” Or as he puts it more directly, “Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word.” Kitsch is life without the shit, it’s the pretense that there’s nothing unseemly or unpleasant, it’s erasing anything that doesn’t fit. Communist kitsch is all the parades and the positive, uplifting art that denies the existence of any societal problems. Epitaphs are often kitsch under this definition, denying the existence of pain or suffering or even death itself, concealing it behind euphemisms. As Kundera says, “Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.”

I also enjoyed the “Short dictionary of misunderstood words”, a series of chapters in which Kundera shows how Franz and Sabina think they understand each other but don’t, because they are using the same words to mean different things. They have met relatively late in life, and are old enough to have accumulated their own meanings and associations and memories, of which the other person is not a part. Whereas Tomas and Sabina were young and could create their own meanings together, Franz and Sabina are too old to do this. Or as Kundera more poetically puts it:

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to them.

I thought this was a great insight, and the book was full of them. Kundera is a close observer of the human condition, and always finds fresh, innovative ways of expressing his ideas. I’m glad that I’ve finally read his most famous book, and glad that it lived up to my high expectations. I’ll keep exploring his lesser-known books now.

Andrew Blackman Milan Kundera book review, kundera, unbearable lightness of being

Warning: this review gives away the ending.

There’s something intensely dissatisfying about stories that end “but it was all a dream and then she woke up.”

Logically, I suppose there shouldn’t be. We accept that a story is made up, we accept that nothing is true, that it is all in effect a dream being dreamt onto the page by the author. But to have the characters dream for large parts of the book is beyond the pale. I felt cheated on reading it, as if I had wasted a few hours reading something that wasn’t true. Well, that’s a novel, dream or no dream.

I think saying “and it was all a dream” is a problem because it is so reminiscent of badly written trash like ‘Dallas’, where the writers get themselves into a situation they don’t want and solve it by saying that everything after the point where the story started to get lost was a dream. It seems too easy, too much of a shortcut.

That isn’t true of this novel, though. I am sure that Milan Kundera did not write himself into a dead end and think, “To hell with it, I’ll make it a dream then.” There are clear dreamlike moments from early on, for example seeing characters in odd places – a waiter from a cafe turns up in a graphologist’s office. And it’s all very well orchestrated, so that only towards the end, when Chantal goes to London and the story becomes incredibly confused and illogical, does it become clear that it’s a dream. Kundera then openly asks the reader who was dreaming and when it started.

The fact that it was a dream raises certain questions, one of which is Kundera’s – who’s dreaming? The novel is narrated from two separate points of view, the lovers Chantal and Jean-Marc, and the perspectives are quite separate, marked off by chapter breaks. So whose dream is it? Another problem is that the dream is not very dreamlike for a long time. There are hints, moments, but mostly it’s a logical story, often with some quite complex ideas being expressed, the sort that seem unlikely even for a casual conversation between lovers and even more unlikely for a dream. For example, Jean-Marc soliloquising after visiting a dying friend in hospital: “Friendship is indispensable to man for the proper function of his memory. Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.” Very insightful and beautifully expressed, but it sounds like Kundera’s thoughts, not Jean-Marc’s speech and certainly not like any kind of dream.

I might read the book again, to see if the boundary between dream and reality becomes clearer. It’s quite short, more of a novella, so it wouldn’t take long. But in any case it is interesting to see how the dream resolution irritated me. I suppose that I had become interested in the characters and the situation, which was very cleverly contrived on a series of misunderstandings. Chantal was in a bad mood, and when Jean-Marc questioned her she said it was because men didn’t look at her any more, which was a thought that had occurred to her but was not really important to her – she said it more to get him off her back. He, however, took it very seriously and decided to write anonymous letters of admiration to her, to make her feel better. She hides them away, and when he sees this it makes him jealous. She, on the other hand, is furious when she discovers that he is the writer and, more, that he has found where she hides the letters. She feels invaded and spied upon, and thinks Jean-Marc has contrived the whole thing to trap her.

I found this a very interesting plot, and sympathised with the characters. I wanted to see where it went, and so to have it go nowhere at all was dissatisfying, despite a grudging admiration for the way the story had been told to keep the balance just right and the truth revealed at the right time.

The tenses of the narration shifted constantly, and I’m not sure why. The present tense seemed to be used mostly for thoughts or feelings, and the past tense for action. Perhaps this was hinting at the dream resolution. Chantal thinks early on in the book “That is why she dislikes dreams: they impose an unacceptable equivalence among the various periods of the same life, a levelling contemporaneity of everything a person has ever experienced; they discredit the present by denying it its privileged status.”
Perhaps the mixed-up tenses are part of the author’s dream. Perhaps it’s not Chantal or Jean-Marc who are dreaming at all, but Milan Kundera.

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