The Unbearable Lightness of Being

A novel set in Czechoslovakia from the Prague Spring of 1968 through the Soviet invasion and its aftermath, in which Kundera regularly interrupts the story with his own reflections. It opens with Nietzsche's idea of eternal return: if each life happens only once, it weighs nothing, so is lightness or weight the better condition? Parmenides counted lightness as positive; the novel tests the question through four lives. Tomas, a Prague surgeon, guards his freedom through many affairs, yet his life is bound to that of his wife Tereza, a photographer who experiences love as weight and jealousy as torment. Sabina, a painter and Tomas's lover, keeps betraying every fixed allegiance, while her later lover Franz, a Geneva professor, lives for causes and grand marches. The essays within the novel consider soul and body, chance, the German saying einmal ist keinmal (once is never), and kitsch as the denial of everything unacceptable in human life. Political pressure comes when Tomas is asked to retract an article about Oedipus.

It turns abstract questions about freedom, commitment and the meaning of a single unrepeatable life into a moving story of love under political oppression.