The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel

Milan Kundera

Harper Collins, 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.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - SeriousGrace - LibraryThing

I love it when books intersect one another. I am finishing up Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and learn that the dog in The Unbearable Lightness of Being is named after Karenin. The Unbearable Lightness of ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - sinki - LibraryThing

A confusing mix of excellent writing, muddled philosophising and the occasional jab of sexism, set against the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. Baffling.

About the author

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel; Harper Perennial modern classics; Modern classics / HarperPerennial; Perennial classics
• Author: Milan Kundera
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Harper Collins, 1999
• ISBN: 0060932139, 9780060932138
• Length: 320 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Classics; Fiction / General; Fiction / Literary