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The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

A Novel
Front Cover
1196 Reviews
HarperCollins, Apr 7, 1999 - Fiction - 320 pages

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.

  

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5 stars
523
4 stars
173
3 stars
92
2 stars
51
1 star
31

Kundera is an unconventional writer, to say the least. - Goodreads
The prose was uninteresting. - Goodreads
I recognized the font. - Goodreads
The women characters are rather more interesting. - Goodreads
Still, Kundera's writing is not beyond reproach. - Goodreads
But the plot is really secondary. - Goodreads

Review: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

User Review  - Piyush - Goodreads

Its hard to believe that the characters in the novel hadn't actually lived. Switching back-and-forth between the actual narrative and his own philosophical meanderings, the author lives his characters ... Read full review

Review: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

User Review  - Yousef - Goodreads

A good novel: taut, intricately woven, intelligent, fragmented. I had to read this book for a modern culture course I'm taking, so I had to focus primarily on the concept of “kitsch” and how it ... Read full review

All 1196 reviews »

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About the author (1999)

The Franco-Czech novelist and critic 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, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves—all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.

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