The unbearable lightness of being - M. Kundera

I read most of Kundera’s books back in high school, days of compulsive reading, then forgot all of them. What I remember I liked is that the author does not really seem to care about the story per se, he just has a point he wants to make and the story is functional to that point, so that it gets just cut or interrupted in the parts where it doesn’t serve the purpose. It’s an interesting style and it makes for a cleaner reading.

The point about unbearable lightness is made explicit in several excerpts, this is maybe the clearest one:

Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will be the history of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe is a pair of sketches from the pen on mankind’s fateful inexperience. History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

The relationship of the individual with this unbearable lightness is explored through the 4 protagonists of the novel: Tomas, Tereza, Sabina and Franz. I think one ought to position them on the four regions of a quadrant, I am just unsure about the labels. Tomas and Sabina fight the unbearable lightness, and come to terms with it in different ways; Tereza and Franz are more passive in this respect, and theirs is a tale of subdual rather than fighting. Tomas and Tereza decide to stay, Franz and Sabina escape.

Common theme of Sabina and Tomas is their wanting of rip the reality to see what’s beneath. Sabina is an artist and expresses this through realistic paintings disfigured by breaches, through which the unintelligible reality can be observed - the realistic, superficial part being referred to as the intelligible lie. The same tendency is more implicitly expressed in Tomas by his being a surgeon, opening the skin with the scalpel to bring to light what lies beneath, and a womanizer, wanting to experience the most intimate and hidden part of as many women as possible.
The common theme for Tereza and Franz is the heavy meaning they give to casual (light) happenings, which end up defining their lives. Tereza binds herself desperately to Tomas and Franz to Sabina; but Tomas stays, and Sabina leaves. So the difference between the two is not their choice, but rather their partner’s.

Context for Thomas and Tereza: they are married. They flee from Prague to Zürich; Tereza comes back to Prague, Franz follows her. Franz cannot work as a surgeon anymore for political reasons, and resorts to being first a window washer, then a pickup driver in a farmer’s commune. At the end of the story, Tereza is happy, because Tomas finally accepted lightness and stopped his obsessive search of what’s beneath; this means he stopped womanizing, but most importantly that he accepts fully his place next to Tereza. Tereza was more or less there from the very beginning of the novel, suffering because Tomas wasn’t.

Context for Sabina and Franz: Sabina flees from Prague to Geneve and becomes Franz’s lover. Franz leaves his wife for her, she decides to leave him in turn. Sabina keeps travelling the world, we still find her restless at the end of the novel, tired of fighting but not ready to accept the lightness; Franz develops some kind of platonic love for Sabina, in the name of which he ends up travelling to Cambodia and dying a futile death.

So we might say that Tomas and Tereza’s is the positive ending and Sabina and Franz’s the negative one. This is an oversimplistic conclusion and does not make justice to the novel.

This is a consideration I liked:

A year or two after emigrating, she [Sabina] happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted no more than a few minutes in the parade.
When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. “You mean you don’t want to fight the occupation of your country?” She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.

I liked it because that’s exactly how I feel about all kind of protest marches. There are slogans I agree with, and sometimes I really support the cause, but it really does make me uncomfortable to be there - it feels wrong.