It ain't heavy

Milan Kundera's 'The Unbearable Lightness Of Being' begins with a discussion of Nietzsche's concept of eternal return, and of Parmenides's labelling of lightness and weight as positive and negative respectively. Andy McNab or Jilly Cooper it is not.

It's a peculiar novel which reminded me of Salman Rushdie's 'Fury' in that the plot, such as it is, is sketchy and the characters, even those central to the narrative - a serial womaniser called Tomas, his wife Tereza and his lover Sabina - are in many ways coincidental, simply convenient fictional devices around which Kundera can weave his philosophical reflections about life, death and everything in between.

Not that he denies this - far from it, entering the novel as its omnipresent and always visible narrator he openly concedes that the characters are entirely fabricated, nothing more than figments of his imagination: "characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about ... The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities". It's as though an interview with the author about his literary practice and beliefs has been embedded within the fabric of the novel itself.

Time and again Kundera unapologetically uses his creations as a springboard for his own thought-adventures, musings about everything from the relationship between humans and animals to Freud's omission of the aesthetic from his theory of dreams. Along the way the reader continually encounters hard nuggets of epigrammatic truth:

"Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us";

"Without realising it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress";

"What is unique about the 'I' hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual 'I' is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered".

For a non-realist - or even anti-realist - novelist, Kundera also has some interesting things to say about his home country - about the realities of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; about the fear, paranoia and restrictions upon freedom which followed; and about romanticised Western visions of protest and resistance against the totalitarian state. However, in keeping with the philosophical reflections in the rest of the book, these observations are not solely serious and solemn in tone; at one point a dissident exclaims: "'The complete recorded lives of the Czech intelligentsia on file in the police archives! Do you know what effort literary historians have put into reconstructing in detail the sex lives of, say, Voltaire or Balzac or Tolstoy? No such problems with Czech writers. It's all on tape. Every last sigh'". It's a wry literary joke, and one that made me smile.

'The Unbearable Lightness Of Being' is a novel that will exercise your face muscles as well as your grey matter.