The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) Milan Kundera

On a practical level, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is several things at once.

To its author Milan Kundera (1929-2023), Lightness was principally a philosophical novel about the uniqueness of each life, about freedom and commitment and betrayal and the meaning of truth. Others tend to see the book as a portrait principally of its characters: Tomáš, a doctor, womanizer, and intellectual; Tereza, a timid, repressed-but-sexually-voracious woman from the provinces who marries Tomáš and transforms into a bold photographer who challenges her own limits and those imposed by the communist regime in which she lives; Sabina, a libertine and close friend to Tomáš who becomes instrumental in Tereza’s growth; and Franz, a lover of Sabina’s who wants from her a commitment she is constitutionally unable to give to him or anyone else. Another angle of the book is its portrayal of the Prague Spring period of Czechoslovak history, when Soviet tanks rolled into the country to suppress its increasing liberal leanings.

So for starters, there is that multidimensional, indeed prismatic nature of the book. It looks like different things depending on the angle of examination.

Lightness is often told in vignettes not always closely woven together in the way that conventional readers might prefer. Somewhat like Tereza’s bold and increasingly dangerous photographs of the Soviet invasion, it uses snapshots to tell its story, where a more conventional approach would be analogous to newsreels or narrative films.

The style of Lightness varies widely among its seven designated Parts. In a few cases, one could easily wonder if they come from the same novel. Many readers and particularly writers would consider this a flaw, but I see it simply as a stylistic choice that reminds us of our freedom as writers to do the same in our own writing.

There is a tastefully (many would say faithfully) eroticized film of Lightness that was released in 1988, starring a 30-year-old Daniel Day-Lewis as Tomáš, a 23-year-old Juliette Binoche as Tereza, and a 32-year-old Lena Olin as Sabina. The international success of the film propelled all three actors to worldwide prominence. Kundera was unhappy with it and thereafter no longer allowed adaptations of his work, and in fairness it does not closely follow the novel. It does, however, stand well on its own and manages to portray the characters and their internal conflicts, along with the spirit of Prague Spring and its suppression. It delves into the communist bureaucratic personalities and conveys well what it was to be young and forced into making choices about what to do with one’s life in such circumstances. The last parts, showing Sabina in America and others in the Czech countryside, are particularly poignant and stand out more than the ending of the novel. The film illustrates the power of cinema to show many things, while illustrating as well the limitations of a showing-over-telling approach. Much of what is missing and presumably disappointed Kundera is the kind of philosophical material that cinema can really only accomplish, and poorly then, through speechifying.