Unbearable Lightness of Being » (Reprint)

Milan Kundera's study of philosophy is evident in his books, which are part meditation, part love story and part satire. In novels such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he asks readers to consider not just his characters, but questions of history and human existence.

A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover — these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.

Janet Malcolm

Brilliant . . . A work of high modernist playfulness and deep pathos. —New York Review of Books

Part One Lightness and Weight 1
Part Two Soul and Body 37
Part Three Words Misunderstood 79
Part Four Soul and Body 129
Part Five Lightness and Weight 173
Part Six The Grand March 241
Part Seven Karenin's Smile 279