The Unbearable Lightness of Being: ‘A Dark and Brilliant Achievement’

The bestselling modern classic Milan Kundera’siconic novel of love and politics in communist Czechoslovakia is a dark andbrilliant achievement (Ian McEwan) by an artist (Salman Rushdie).

A cult figure. The Guardian
An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere. SalmanRushdie
A dark and brilliant achievement. Ian McEwan
Shamelessly clever … Exhilaratingly subversive and funny. TheIndependent
A modern classic … As relevant now as when it was first published. John Banville

A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon a mantorn between his love for her and his womanising. His mistress, a free-spiritedartist, lives her life as a series of betrayals, while her other lover standsto lose everything because of his noble qualities.

In a world where lives are shaped by choices and events, andeverything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance and weight and we feel the unbearable lightness of being.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being encompasses passionand philosophy, infidelity and ideas, the Prague Spring and modern America,political acts and private desires, comedy and tragedy in fact, all of humanexistence.

About the Author
Milan Kundera was a French-Czech novelist born in the Czech Republic wholived in France from 1975 until his death in Paris in 2023.

Michael Henry Heim was a professor of SlavicLanguages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at UCLA.