The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Book Review

TLDR: 4.3/5 stars, different approach to the "normal" plot progression that worked well.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera is one that caught my attention with its cover. The very simple design of the line art dog on the big, white space that is the cover looked interesting––it looked like one of those high brow literary novels that make you seem interesting just for reading it. And to be fair, I do still think that way of the book, at least a little bit.

I originally bought this as a physical paperback, but hadn't gotten around to it yet by the time I discovered the magically convenient world of audio books. So instead of reading it, I listened to it. Because of my experience in listening to it, I do want to read it in the future, because this book deserves a reread. It is a bit of a jumble of timelines and characters' stories, so rereading it will, I'm sure, make me see new things now that I've already been through the story once.

Contains spoilers.

The book starts with two chapters on lightness versus heaviness, a philosophical meandering of words about whether the two are similar to subjects like light versus dark, or bad versus good. In theory, if they were similar, lightness should be good, and heaviness bad. It's a very interesting start to the story, though it had me thinking it was a book about philosophy, and not a fictional story. However, I was wrong, the story started after chapter two. And, as you can see by the title, the author thinks lightness and heaviness are not similar to the other examples.

I can't write a review for The Unbearable Lightness of Being without diving into the story. That's why this review contains spoilers. The story follows a cast of I'd say four people, though two are the main characters. They are in a very disfunctional relationship, and this relationship will continue until they die. Though it's dysfunctional, it's an interesting one. The male main character is a serial fucker and has been for a while as far as the story tells us, and his new relationship with the female main character does not stop this. She is aware of it, and though she hates it, she does not leave him.

This hate and jealousy she feels towards his affairs is a big theme in their story, and she is made to feel like it's a personality trait of his instead of a rather heinous thing to be putting your partner through. We get told their story through both their perspectives, and though she leaves sometimes, they always end up together. I'm not particularly fond of that part of the story. He keeps trying to justify it by saying that sex and love are two different things, and that the female main character is the only one he loves, but I still find him to be a prat for not adjusting his course of action when his partner is very clearly not alright with his actions.

Their falling in love started, at least from the male main character's perspective, from the moment she came to his apartment, they had sex, and the following week or so she had a fever and stayed at his place during it. He described her as a child arriving in a basket at his doorstep, like Mozes. I'm sure things were different in the 80's, when this novel came out, but it bugged me all throughout. Him seeing her as this thing, this "child" to take care of instead of an equal partner––and that was how he fell in love––was well written in the sense that it's a very real thing that happens, but I hated it nonetheless. This is not a critique of the author, because he writes her character to have plenty of issues of her own, but rather a reflection of my disdain for people like the male main character. They would be far better off apart, but alas. She is an interesting character, and so is he.

We get to know about their professional careers, too, and these parts interested me a lot more than the cycle of affair and jealousy of their relationship. It's set during the cold war, and the country they're in is under communist or socialist regime and occupation of Russia. The male main character is a very talented doctor, and as his life's story progress, loses it all because he wrote "against the party values". After he's let go from his post as a well-off doctor, he becomes a window washer (read: sex worker for women). Then, late in his life, he and the female main character move to the country.

The female main character gets a job through one of the male main character's mistresses (Sabine, who is another character we follow, though starting a bit later in the story), working in media. She later becomes a photographer, photographing Russian forces as they occupy the country.

Sabine, a painter (by the way, it's been a couple of days since I listened to the book and as good as I am with remembering plotpoints, so bad am I with names), who is the third character we follow, is one of the male main character's (it's no coincidence I keep referring to him as such) mistresses, and his favorite, as far as the book tells us. But not for the reason you'd think: he favors her because she is as "no strings attached" as he is. She is a painter who started out painting only in the style of realism––after she accidentally spills paint over a painting, creating a red breach on it, she adopts a style that shows what's hidden underneath the first glance. I liked this, being an artist myself.

The fourth is another of Sabine's affairs––another married man. He's married to a woman he deems frail and like his mother, though when he tells her about the affair later in the book, she is nothing like what he thought. They split up, and he starts seeing a younger woman. He's happy with that.

The writing style was very interesting, it's not something I read often. Like I mentioned earlier, the timelines are very jumbled, as are the points of view. For example, we start the novel seeing everything from the male main character's point of view, and we do so for quite a chunk of their lives' story. Then, after a while, we get the point of view of the female main character, and we start with their first meeting again. So though we've already seen everything from the man's perspective, we see it now through hers. I do quite like that approach.

However, once we bring Sabine and the other man into the mix, we now hear, far before the story's over, that the two main characters died in a car accident. Then we go back to them, alive. It is an odd way of doing things, and left me a bit melancholic in the middle of the story, before it was even over. That being said, when I finished the story––and I'd already known they died in a car crash––it wasn't so bad at all. As the ending doesn't show their death, I got away relatively unscathed, emotionally, because I already processed their death earlier. It's an odd way of playing with the reader's emotions, but I applaud it. It worked out well, in this case.

Overall, all things considered, I enjoyed the story. The characters felt like real people, though very flawed. It felt like a realistic progression of the four lives. I enjoyed the tone of writing that the author used. I would recommend this book if you don't mind reading about a serial cheater and chaotic timeline-organization.