FN Blog - Seven heads are better than one!

For some reason, I found a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera in my room. Its yellowish pages had those brownish speckles that betrayed its age—but I can’t even remember buying or borrowing this book!

It was a familiar title, and it was even turned into a movie, so I had such high expectations. It’s heralded by some as a post-modern masterpiece, which kind of left me confused. Because honestly, I hated it! I struggled through it (because I hate starting a book without finishing it). It was utterly…unbearable!

OK, the requisite back-cover summary: It’s pretty much about four people whose lives are entwined. There’s Tomas—primarily a womanizer, he’s also a Czech surgeon, later forced to become a window washer because he dared to criticize the government; Tereza, Tomas’s wife, who comes into his life by a series of chance occurrences; Sabina, an artist and one of Tomas’s many mistresses; and Franz, Sabina’s lover (who’s also married). All this is set in Czechoslovakia, at a time when the political climate was tense, to say the least, and intellectuals were living a less-than-ideal life.

True, it has a few gems and can be quite insightful, but I think it just isn’t for me. Other people just heaped praise onto this book—it consistently gets high marks from reviewers—and when I dared to tell a friend that I hated it, I got a snappy, “But why? There’s so much that you could get from it! It’s beautiful!” Meanwhile, here I am wondering if I just missed the point. Part of me feels like I probably just didn’t get it. Another part of me feels like that kid at the end of The Emperor’s New Clothes: While everyone is in awe of the emperor’s invisible attire, there I am, scratching my head, exclaiming, “But he’s naked!”