Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness Of Being

Up to p 90/314 now, and gradually decoding the style, so I'll probably stick with it to the end to then see if the whole effort was worthwhile.

I read this book while I was doing my Literature course in college. This one and The Joke by the same author....the writing is heavy- reading is slow because of the sheer weight of thoughts associated with the writing.
I will have to read them again sometime if I have to take home something meaningful from Kundera. I feel Kundera, Naipal, V Woolf- are all pretty difficult authors.

Notibuti said:

I was 17 when I first read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and I remember being absolutely enamoured with Kundera. However, when I revisited the books again a decade later, I found myself solely disappointed. They weren't as brilliant as I remembered them to be. The narrative and characters were flat, stark and lacked subtlety; they seemed more like archetypals than real people.

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Interesting, I had a similar experience with this same book.I read it @ 22 and liked it...my review here 30 years later....

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Notibuti said:

The narrative and characters were flat, stark and lacked subtlety; they seemed more like archetypals than real people.

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Interesting comment because I had the same feeling in reading Lightness. I wished that the narrator had spoken less and allowed the plot to play itself out more by itself. I finally concluded that the narrator was talkatively spinning a yarn to educate the reader about his philosophical outlook, and was introducing epsisodes and characters only as examples to illustrate the point he was currently making. It really got obtrusive when he also then stepped in and explained what had just happened. In short, more "showing" and less "telling" would have been appreciated (by me).

Peder said:

Interesting comment because I had the same feeling in reading Lightness. I wished that the narrator had spoken less and allowed the plot to play itself out more by itself. I finally concluded that the narrator was talkatively spinning a yarn to educate the reader about his philosophical outlook, and was introducing epsisodes and characters only as examples to illustrate the point he was currently making. It really got obtrusive when he also then stepped in and explained what had just happened. In short, more "showing" and less "telling" would have been appreciated (by me).

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I agree with you on the more showing and less telling. I prefer Maugham's way of characterization. He takes a couple of paragraphs to paint the complete picture of a particular character. By the end of these paragraphs, you will know the character like the back of your hand, so to say.

While you wished the author talked less, I preferred the philosophical passages over the story. I would look forward to when the narrator talks next. The story didn't hold any interest for me, but the author's philosophical passages about people in general were interesting. I didn't want the narrator to dissect every incident, but liked his thoughts about human nature in general.

sanyuja said:

I preferred the philosophical passages over the story. I would look forward to when the narrator talks next. The story didn't hold any interest for me, but the author's philosophical passages about people in general were interesting.

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That sounds like it would be a productive way to reread the story, reading only the narrator's words and skipping over the "story" parts entirely. I don't think that would do too much injustice to it, because the narrator seems to me to be positioned like he is actually the central character while the others are peripheral. It would be nice to see the narrator in an integrated way to see what sort of person he was.

Dayspring said:

I read it about an year ago. I like the way Milan Kundera wrote it as not fully a novel but filled with incidental paragraphs. I like how he inserted notes with philosophical thoughts into the story. It relaxes the tension of plots and release readers' minds to read the characters as samples of human based on same humanity but lead different values.

For me this book is full of interesting and essential facts of lives.

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Yes. In a weird way it reminded me of Three Men in a Boat, where Jerome also stops the narrative at almost every page to offer a philosophical thought. The difference is that Jerome's thoughts were humorous.