The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Czech language: Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí) is a novel written by Milan Kundera in 1982 and first published in 1984 in France. Set in 1968 Prague, the novel details the circumstances of life for artists and intellectuals in Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Prague Spring and the subsequent invasion by the USSR. The story's main character is Tomas, a well-known, successful surgeon, who criticizes the Czech Communists and as a result loses his position. Other important characters (who, together with Tomas, make up the group known as Kundera's Quartet) include his wife Tereza (a photographer), his lover Sabina (a painter), and Sabina's lover Franz (a university professor).

According to Kundera, "being" is full of "unbearable lightness" because each of us has only one life to live: "Einmal ist Keinmal" ("once is nonce", i.e., "what happened once might as well have never happened at all"). Therefore, each life is ultimately insignificant; every decision ultimately does not matter. Since decisions do not matter, they are "light": they do not tie us down. But at the same time, the insignificance of our decisions - our lives, or being - is unbearable. Hence, "the unbearable lightness of being." The subject matter causes some critics to label this novel as a modernist work, while others see it as a celebratory explosion of post-modernism.

A paperback edition was reprinted in New York by Perennial in 1999 with ISBN 0-06-093213-9.

The first publishing of the original Czech version was in 1985 in exile publishing house 68 Publishers (Toronto, Canada). The second Czech publishing was in October 2006, in Brno (Czech Republic), almost 18 years after the Velvet Revolution, because Kundera didn't approve it earlier.

[edit] Film

Main article: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (film)

In 1988, an American-made film adaptation of the novel was released.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Works by Milan Kundera
Novels: The Joke \| Laughable Loves \| Life Is Elsewhere \| The Farewell Waltz \| The Book of Laughter and Forgetting \| The Unbearable Lightness of Being \| Immortality \| Slowness \| Identity \| Ignorance
Non-fiction: The Art of the Novel \| Testaments Betrayed \| The Curtain
Plays: Jacques and His Master