the unbearable lightness of being, a review

i’ve only read two thirds of it. the boy who gave me the book stopped talking to me, so i can't be arsed to read it anymore. but i have thoughts.

for those blissfully unaware, the unbearable lightness of being is a story about two couples. it's actually two stories since they are only very loosely related to each other, which is your first sign that this is not a book about the characters themselves but a way for the writer to make a ‘point’ via the characters.

put plainly, the book is insufferably sexist, but fine- i’ll stop taking issue with women written by men. that which is unknown to them will at best be regarded a fantasy. i have accepted this. but then why are your male characters also so pathetically written? the first man, Thomas, is barely allowed a thought to himself. and the second one, Franz, is most likely a self insert for Kundera, the author because he is exactly as stupid as Kundera is self aware.

& i confess, all this misery is mildly entertaining sometimes. even the most pathetic person in the world should write a book. let me hear every sad, lonely thought in your head.

after witnessing these couples writhe in the metaphorical car crash that is the first third of this book, the author gets too lazy to be subtle about the point(s) he was trying to make and introduces an avant-garde, meta section called A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words. these are essay style passages about very specific words and the difference in how Franz, a married professor, and Sabina, his mistress, understand them. & you can probably guess the first word at this point: Woman.

& the character who suffers the most at the hands of this misunderstanding, Tereza, is killed off in a literal car crash immediately after, before we can ever hear from her again.

the book pretends to be about all these big abstract ideas like Being but the only real theme in the book is fidelity. the only tension between the characters, the unspoken root of all their conflict, the big burden or weight that contests the lightness of being is just fidelity. and don't get me wrong- i’m a hardcore polyamory propogandist, but for all his philosophical musing, Kundera can't once explicitly discuss the basis of fidelity as a social phenomenon.

more importantly, does he ever wonder why fidelity comes so easily to the women in his fantastical world while the men are just constantly crushed by the weight of their guilt about their infidelity.

at this point, i can only hope Franz, the boring academic who left his wife for a mistress who left him because it was only fun when she was a mistress, sweet Franz, Kundera’s self insert who eventually ends up dating one of his students gives up on academia and writes a book called the Unsustainable Fuckery of Being and we can all give him head for it.

goodnight.