The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Characters/People edit see section history

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• Tomas: The protagonist; Czech surgeon, thinker and womanizer who separates sex and love in his life; married once before ten years ago for two years, of which resulted a son
• Tereza: Tomas's wife. She is a photographer.
• Sabina: Tomas' mistress and close friend; a painter and intellectual who protests against kitsch and puritanism; a symbol of living a "light" life.
• Franz: A professor in Geneva who falls in love with Sabina.
• Karenin: Tomas and Tereza's dog.
• Marie-Claude: Wife of Franz.
• Marie-Anne: Daughter of Franz and Marie-Claude.
• Mefisto: A pig that Karenin (Tomas and Tereza's dog) befriends in the country.
• Tomas' ex-wife (minor): has custody of their son, and keeps him from regularly seeing his father even though Tomas visitation legally set for once every other week, and whom she is paid 1/3 of Tomas' salary for.
• Tomas' son (minor): Given the name of Simon, he is alienated from his father until the end of the book, when he begins to write letters to him.

Quotes edit see section history

• “...the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? in the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine... in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore cynically permitted."”

  Narrator

• “The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities”

• “Yes, a husband's funeral is a wife's true wedding”

• “Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

• “Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”

• “We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come”

• “Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”

• “But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave”

• “But the fragile edifice of their love would certainly come tumbling down. For that edifice rested on the single column of her fidelity, and loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.”

  Tereza reflecting on the cost of her infidelity

• “Because love means renouncing strength”

• “Now we are longtime outcasts, flying through the emptiness of time in a straight line. Yet somewhere deep down a thin thread stil ties us to that far-off misty Paradise, where Adam leans over a well and, unlike Narcissus, never even suspects that the pale yellow blotch appearing in it is he himself. The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.”

• “True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.”

• “A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.”

• “Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.”

• “Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.”

• “What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.”

• “…the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies…”

• “"The goals we pursue are always veiled."”

• “Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”

• “Tomas...came to the conclusion that the love story of his life exemplified not 'Es muss sein!' (It must be so), but rather 'Es konnte auch anders sein" (It could just as well be otherwise).”

  Tomas reflecting on the six chance fortuities that led him to Tereza

• “It had taken six chance happenings to push Tomas towards Tereza, as if he had little inclination to go to her on his own.”

  Tomas reflecting on how he met Tereza

• “If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.”

  Tereza's thoughts on her relationship with her mother

• “After Tomas had returned to Prague from Zurich, he began to feel uneasy at the thought that his acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six improbable fortuities. But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? 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.”

  Narrator

• “If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.”

  Narrator

• “And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities."”

  Franz to Sabina

• “Or to be more precise: Marie-Claude proclaimed Sabina's pendant ugly to make it clear that she could afford to tell Sabina that her pendant was ugly....Yes, Franz saw it plainly: Marie-Claude had taken advantage of the occasion to make clear to Sabina (and others) what the real balance of power was between the two of them.”

  Franz observing an exchange between his mistress and his wife

• “A man who loses his privacy loses everything, Sabina thought.”

• “For Franz, living in truth meant breaking down the barriers between the private and the public.”

• “Sabina could not understand why the dead would want to have imitation palaces built over them. The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone.”

• “...Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.”

• “What is unique about the 'I' hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person....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....There are many more resemblances between Hitler and Einstein, or Brezhnev and Solzhenitsyn than there are differences. Using numbers, we might say that there is one-millionth part dissimilarity to nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine millionths parts similarity.”

  Tomas reflecting on the thrill of his conquests

• “Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world. The obsession of the former is lyrical....The obsession of the latter is epic....”

  Narrator

• “We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions--love, antipathy, charity, or malice--and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.”

  Tereza reflecting on why she behaved lovingly toward Tomas

• “Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.”

  Tomas to Tereza on his hesitancy at engaging in a relationship with his grown son

• “<p.3> The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify? Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.”

• “<p.4> If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who eternally returns, and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.”

• “<p.4> Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature.”

• “<p.4> In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”

• “<p.4> This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.”

• “<p.5> In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht). If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness. But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes”

• “<p.8> Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”

• “<p.8> He remained annoyed with himself until he realized that not knowing what he wanted was actually quite natural. We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. Was it better to be with Tereza or to remain alone? There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis of comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, ‘sketch’ is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, and outline with no picture.”

• “<p.10-11> Again it occurred to him that Tereza was a child put in a pitch-daubed basket and sent downstream. He couldn’t very well let a basket with a child in it float down a stormy river! If the Pharaoh’s daughter hadn’t snatched the basket carrying little Moses from the waves, there would have been no Old Testament, no civilization as we know it! How many ancient myths begin with the rescue of an abandoned child! If Polybus hadn’t taken in the young Oedipus, Sophocles wouldn’t have written his most beautiful tragedy! Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”

• “<p.11-12> When, one Sunday, the boy’s mother again canceled a scheduled visit, Tomas decided on the spur of the moment never to see him again. Why should he feel more for that child, to whom he was bound by nothing but a single improvident night, than for any other? He would be scrupulous about paying support; he just didn’t want anybody making him fight for his son in the name of paternal sentiments!”

• “<p. 12> The only thing they bequeathed to him was a fear of women. Tomas desired but feared them. Needing to create a compromise between fear and desire, he devised what he called ‘erotic friendship.’ He would tell his mistresses: the only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other. To ensure that erotic friendship never grew into the aggression of love, he would meet each of his long-term mistresses only at intervals. He considered this method flawless and propagated it among his friends.”

• “<p.13> The unwritten contract of erotic friendship stipulated that Tomas should exclude all love from his life. The moment he violated that clause of the contract, his other mistresses would assume inferior status and become ripe for insurrection.”

• “<p.15> Tomas came to this conclusion: Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”

• “<p.19> All languages that derive from Latin form the word "compassion" by combining the prefix meaning "with" (com-) and the root meaning "suffering" (Late Latin, passio).”

• “<p.22> 'You seem to be turning into the theme of all my paintings,' she said. 'The meeting of two worlds. A double exposure. Showing through the outline of Tomas the libertine, incredibly, the face of a romantic lover. Or, the other way, through a Tristan, always thinking of his Tereza, I see the beautiful, betrayed world of the libertine.'”

• “<p.23> He was in a bind: in his mistresses' eyes, he bore the stigma of his love for Tereza; in Tereza's eyes, the stigma of his exploits with the mistresses.”

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Prague
• Geneva
• Zurich
• Cambodia
• Paris
• Europe
• Switzerland
• America
• Russia
• Rome
• New York
• Petrin Hill
• Amsterdam
• Czecheslovakia

Organizations edit see section history

• Communist Party of Czechoslovakia: Add a description of this organization.

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• Kitsch: Describe this term.
• Nietsche
• Parmenides
• "das schwerste Gewicht": a burden of the heaviest weight, as cited by Nietsche
• Pharaoh
• Moses
• Old Testment
• Polybus
• Oedipus
• Sophocles
• libertine
• Tristan

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Lightness and Weight: Describe this theme.
• Soul and Body
• Politics
• Sexuality
• Eternal return: A concept which posits that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space.
• reality vs dreams: in the book Tereza tries to accept the reality of her relationship with Tomas early on, but her dreams torment her with an idealized alternative to her tragic reality

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Milan Kundera (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Michael Henry Heim (Translator) - Translated from Czech to English.
2. Jana Beranová (Translator) - Translated from Czech to Dutch
3. Jaroslav Skrušný (Translator)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• BBC's Big Read (April 2003, #191)
• Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1984: Fiction)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PG5039.21.U6N413
• Dewey: 891.8635

Notes for Parents edit see section history

The book contains considerable adult content.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Book and Film Review: I have never met someone who has read this novel and not loved it. I had one co-worker, at Borders, who recommended it to every single customer that he possibly could. People don’t love it for the plot. The plot can be explained simply enough. Tomas, a doctor in Prague, has a sexual relationship with Sabina. They both believe in the separation of sex and relationships. They f*** without connecting. Then Tomas meets a waitress named Tereza, who eventually follows him back to Prague. He lets her stay with him, then they marry. Then 1968 arrives with the Prague Spring and their lives are uprooted. But the novel is so much more than that. It is a celebration of life itself. In the first sentence it brings up Nietzsche’s notion of eternal return and then posits that against the idea that there is but one life, one chance. “What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

Movie Connections edit see section history

• The Unbearable Lightness of Being (IMDb): Release Date: 5 February 1988 (USA)

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