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The Brilliant Irony of Levity

The Unbearable Lightness of Being By Milan Kundera New York: Harper & Row; 314 pp.; $15.95

Tereza comes to conclude, at the end of the novel, that the purest love is between a human and an animal; she wishes her husband were a rabbit. Tomas himself decides that "Attaching love to sex was one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever had."

Most brilliantly, Kundera makes Tomas follow Tereza back into Czechoslovakia simply so that Tomas can make sure that their love is not an accident, that it is not light. Tomas has been impressed prior to this by the series of coincidences which first caused him to meet Tereza, he was able to reconstruct six. Thus his decision to follow her back, though to anyone else an act of utmost folly, to him makes sense he thinks that this single act will overcome the lightness of his life.

KUNDERA IS A CAPABLE narrator but a puzzling novelist; it seems his sensibility is more mature than his technique. For a novel which takes as its theme vicissitude and secular vanity. Kundera uses surprisingly little imagery of change, transformation, and decay. The narrator is highly intelligent; but his intelligence is not fully lent to any of the characters. Their dialogue is not as witty or engaging as the narrator's, we are never told how everyone in the novel became conscious of lightness. Unreasonably, no one who makes religious or metaphysical assumptions is allowed on stage; one gets the feeling that Kundera is confused by such people and (unlike Waugh or Forster) cannot write about them.

The unembodied intelligence of the narrative is unsettling. I have never met any unembodied intelligences--very few, I think, exist--and I would expect someone as intelligent as Kundera to focus not so much on his own intelligence as on the varying receptivity of the social medium on which intelligence depends. However, there is surprisingly little of such treatment in the book.

Also troublesome is the fact that at certain points the narrator exhibits a faith in the absolute value of art. Judging the narrator on his own terms, this faith is touching in its naivete but jarring in its irrationality; perhaps such a narrator must consciously foster illusions in order to do his work, but he should not obtrude such a perversion of the will upon the reader.

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These problems, however, must be weighed against the other parts of the book, many of which are dazzling. Kundera seems to work well in the artful and engaging tradition of Robert Musil: this book is worth reading and re-reading.

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