(Milan Kundera, 1985)

I loved this book. It was a little hard to get into at first because it is all at once a character portrayal love-story, paying attention to the motives and intimate lives of the four main characters, yet also a text on social theory, at times examining the origin and connotations of politically-charged words. Once I was able to bridge the gap between the two viewpoints I began to better understand the main argument. The novel seems to concern itself mostly with trying to understand the “lightness of being,” an idea that the events of life are so circumstantial that one small alteration in the course of history could easily change any number of timelines — one character thinks about how her husband could have married any other woman had certain, very minor events happened differently, changing the course of their relationship. To me, while trying to prove a “lightness” to life, the book creates it’s own antithesis — if small occurrences could so easily change history then there must be a “heaviness,” an importance, to each as well. But the best part about this book is the author’s ability to use the politics of Russian-occupied Prague to illuminate the ways in which people become occupied by their interpersonal relationships.

Highly recommended.

Notable excerpt:

Her feeling was rather that, given the nature of the human couple, the love of man and woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog, that oddity of human history probably unplanned by the Creator.

It is a completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not ever ask him to love her back. Nor had she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couples: Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.

And something else: Tereza accepted Karenin for what he was; she did not try to make him over in her image; she agreed from the outset with his dog’s life, did not wish to deprive him of it, did not deny him his secret intrigues. The reason she trained him was not to transform him (as a husband tries to reform his wife and a wife her husband), but to provide him with the elementary language that enabled them to communicate and live together.