The Unbearable Tightness of the Unbearble Lightness of Being

REMEMBER:
1. I’m not a genius. I just like books.
2. I can be a little off-task at times.
3. I’m not exactly topical.
4. I never claimed to have good taste.

Books read since last we spoke: The Time Traveller’s Wife, The Sirens of Titan, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, The Shadow of the Wind

I am extremely reluctant to confess my ardent, moony, schoolboy-like love of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I’m not sure I know how best to explain this reluctance…I mean, it’s a great book. It’s beautiful, lyrical, and heartfelt, its characters are passionate, its ideas stimulating. Why be ashamed to like that?

Well, it’s because I kinda feel like I’m supposed to like U.L.O.B. You know? It’s like there’s a type of person who’s just gonna be a sucker for all that truth and beauty. It’s like being manipulated, it’s a little like being a lightweight. I picture some older, more experienced reader jerking his thumb at my thunderstruck face from across the library and saying "Hey, look at the kid over there. Somebody can't handle a little truth and beauty. Christ, what a mess. Do you think he's gonna try and drive?"

Fellas, do you like film version of High Fidelity? Because I felt the same way about that movie: it gave me a creepy feeling like someone, somewhere, in a nice suit, had me a little too pegged. As if in some Hollywood boardroom a marketing exec stood up said “We’re going to make a movie for guys in their mid-to-late twenties, who are intellectual, ineffectual, really really like music, fear real life and obsess over there romantic ineptitudes.” Then he clicks a little trigger and a slide of my face pops up on the screen. “Guys like him,” he says.

That's one too many clunky metaphors for one blog, so I'll suffice to say that if one can be that finely marketed to, can be placed so effectively in such a narrow group, it gives one the feeling that perhaps one isn’t quite the individual one thinks of oneself as.And I don’t know a single brainy, hip, well-read, romantic, creative, thoughtful person (of either sex) in their mid-to-late twenties who doesn’t love this book like a Baptist loves judging you. So if that means I belong to a ‘type’…oh well, there are worse types I could be a part of. Baptists.

Enough of this mad banter. Let’s talk about the book. Please don’t think for a moment that I was saying that High Fidelity and Unbearable Lightness of Being are similar, for while I love them both equally (and one is actually referenced in the other…hmm…weird) that is about the only thing they have in common. Both works are highly referential, but while High Fidelity draws its life from pop music, U.L.O.B. (as befits a novel of ideas) is all over the board. Kundera weaves his tapestry using threads from Kafka, Beethoven, Nietzsche, Parmenides, and Tolstoy. If that sounds like a mess, if it sounds over-intellectualized and inaccessible, I assure you it isn’t: all of these ideas are illustrated in a quiet, calm way, as they apply to the lives of his characters. The book has been called narration-heavy, and perhaps it is. But what a narrator! I wish that someone so wise, well spoken and understanding was following me around, explaining my life.

I feel odd about wrapping the blog up right now, because I know that some of you are no doubt saying: “that’s all well and good, but what’s it about?” I don’t think I’m going to tell you. It’s not laziness that stops me, or the very pertinent fact that I have to go the bathroom. It’s that a summary of plot is irrelevant to an understanding of this book. Beauty cannot be synopsized. I could say it’s about the journey through life of four characters–one Swiss, three Czech–as they live out what Kundera calls the symphony of their lives. I could tell you it’s about how they love and betray each other, about how some die and others live. But that would be shallow. When I was assembling my thoughts for this blog I asked my friend Jeremy how he would summarize U.L.O.B., and he said he wouldn’t bother trying. When he talks to people about this book, he says “just read it.”

So just read it.

If that’s not enough, here are some quotes:

“Love does not make itself known in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends itself to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep.”

“In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblem of a secret brotherhood.”

“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according the laws of beauty without realizing it, even in times of great distress.”

“She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical slogans in unison.”

"Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity."