The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

I am eternally burdened to have my nationality. It's what I was born with, it's what I will always suffer from. Perhaps imagining I wasn't part of this mess seems lovely yet I am still burdened and therefore have to live up to it. 

This book came as a surprise to me, I wasn't looking for it, I hadn't the faintest idea it even existed but as a fortunate event I found it. I had been reading Nietzsche for the past couple of days (albeit unsuccessfully), and felt tremendously frustrated because I couldn't understand half of it. Then surfing the internet I came across a cool website that shows you the first page of random book without telling you its title. After shuffling through a couple pages and almost giving up, I finally found a really interesting one with Nietzsche on it. The first page is entirely different than the rest; it almost seemed to me like a study or essay about Nietzsche and I thought to myself I should read this if I hoped to understand the German philosopher. When I eventually revealed the title I fell in love, such a deep, dreamy almost melodramatic title didn't have any place in a non-fiction book and felt it was my duty to read it.

And as such I did. I realized right from the start it was actually a novel from Czech author Milan Kundera, a character whose private and almost anonymous life seemed really interesting to me. It narrates the life of several Czech people including Tomas (the main character), Tereza (the wife) and Sabina (the mistress). But it wasn't a boring love triangle story. Heck, I'm not even sure you can even call it a love story. It was a story about people, about what motivates them. It's about understanding why they do the things they do. William Faulkner once said "The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself" and did Milan deliver! Even he addressed this issue:

"The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I'm equally fond of them and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border [...] which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become..."

Now, concerning the contents of the book it narrates the story of polygamous Tomas's love towards Tereza in communist Prague, Czechoslovakia. The first page sets the mood for the novel talking about Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return giving it a mysterious aura that lasts for the whole book. He himself, being a doctor (made me have a lot of empathy for the guy), is often plagued by doubts concerning his life, his career, his love life, his national values and his own perception of right and wrong; and as such, these are the matters the book discusses: our lives, our choices, our passions, our patriotism and our morals.

However, if I were to name a single characteristic that I found to be the best, then language/writing style would definitely take the cake. At first glance you may find his writing style a bit polemic, but that is not his intention -- he is only expressing what he thinks, regardless of it being politically correct or not, almost resembling his own lightness. I found myself understanding most if not all of it and not having to re-read it multiple times (something I hate to do) unlike other books. Chapter 3's Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words was one of the most original things I've seen in a book for quite some time; giving words an enormous amount of context and background which can sometimes be taken for granted. 

This book was certainly a fresh breath of air for me. It came at the perfect time, and it deals with stuff I was myself dealing with. It also contains really iconic moments and phrases such as Einmal ist keinmal, kitsch, and Es muss sein! (I can definitely picture this with millions of people marching to Beethoven's last work). This last phrase may accurately represent this book's motif, the questioning of our own fate (Muss es sein? -- Must it be?) and finally accepting it (Ja, es muss sein -- Yes, it must be), perhaps helping us embrace the things that happen and realizing that they muss sein. All in all, this book I found under some fortuities (having read Nietzsche days before, in a randomized website) had an uncanny resemblance to my state of mind and helped me accept and embrace my own unbearable lightness of being.