Synopses & Reviews
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals — while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel the unbearable lightness of being.
A major achievement from one of the world's truly great writers, Milan Kundera's magnificent novel of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.
Synopsis
A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover — these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel the unbearable lightness of being not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.
About the Author
The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels
The Joke,
Life Is Elsewhere,
Farewell Waltz,
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and
Immortality, and the short-story collection
Laughable Loves — all originally in Czech.
His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.