Q

As its title suggests, the novel is one of seeming paradoxes that come into focus as perfect parallels. Milan Kundera’s works are at once Brechtian yet decidedly romantic. The Unbearable Lightness is a concise testament to his literary style. The exposing of fictive and literary techniques; the non-chronological narrative placing the climax and ending ahead of its traditional time in a plot; the constant exposition of political ideas, beliefs about relationships, humans, love, life, death, and loss.

While the characters are moulded to be vehicles of Kundera’s exploration of themes / ideals, they are no less nuanced and complex – in fact, much more so – than a character in any other fictional work. Just as with Immortality, it is challenging to not identify and feel strongly for the fictive persons of Kundera’s imagination (borne of an image, a gesture, a sound, a feeling within himself) despite and because of their faults and very human-ness.

I am in love especially with an excerpt in the last page of this novel. You can say I’m pleasantly surprised at how melancholic yet romantic Kundera made the ending. It verges on kitsch, which most of the book expounded on (mostly against). Which makes it suspect as a deliberate and self-reflexive literary choice on the author’s part. After all, as Kundera himself believes, no one can escape kitsch.

She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being