Book Review - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Friendly philosophy fall-out from Eastern European revolution

Not so much a novel as the Kundera’s seamlessly spliced together philosophical musings, The Unbearable Lightness of Being makes affected people gush that this book can change your life. It can’t. But it will make you think, and think hard. If you liked last month’s Alain de Botton then read this next: Kundera is one of de Botton’s forebears in style and substance, a man influenced by the likes of Rousseau and Nietzsche, and imbued with the electric realities of the revolutionary times in which he wrote. The Unbearable Lightness is both passionate and reserved, alive and yet removed. Published in 1984 in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia where Kundera was born (though the book is more French than Czech in style), it is a diametric work that contrasts bright and dark, lightness and heaviness, the head and the heart. It will leave you floating somewhere between these poles, all the richer for having read it.

The plot is functional for this philosophical purpose and Kundera’s characters never fully develop enough psychological depth to give them personal warmth, but despite this one of the most common responses to The Unbearable Lightness is that readers identify with the four main protagonists. Tomas is perhaps the most outstanding of the quartet. A successful Czech surgeon and rampant womaniser, Tomas falls foul of the communist regime through his misunderstood political articles, and is reduced to washing windows. He boasts hundreds of mistresses, but clinically separates these sexual misadventures from his honest love of his wife, the downtrodden Tereza. Tereza only fully comprehends the extent of Tomas’s adultery when she identifies the strange odour emanating from his hair as the smell of other women’s genitalia. The plot attaches itself to one mistress, Sabina, and follows her to Paris, and through her relationship with another married man, Franz. These, then, are the most substantial storylines of Kundera’s work.

But the characters are merely marionettes to play out sequences that Kundera can apply his ideas to, each carefully prepared with philosophical paintwork that is more significant than the puppet itself. The significance of this modern classic, then, rests on Kundera’s understanding of the human condition as fragile and ephemeral; a lightness of being that weighs each of us down with the passing profanity of our existence. If this seems a little convoluted, don’t worry. Kundera’s brilliance is in his ability to make the most intricate of philosophies not only relevant, but also manageable. Read this book. You might not understand it all, but you’ll certainly be better off for having tried.

Book Review - Essays in Love by Alain de Botton

Generic self-help or insightful genius? You decide...

De Botton is one of those annoyingly clever people whose propensity for accurate, insightful thought will make your teeth ache. He is multi-lingual (of Swiss origin), he is remarkably intelligent (having received a double starred first from Cambridge in 1991) and he is ridiculously successful (with five books to his name by the time he turned thirty). But, please, don’t let this put you off. He is also one of the few writers of our time interested in blowing the dust from the stuffy philosophical literature that most of us will never touch, and transforming philosophy into something relevant, helpful, and (dare I say it) fashionable.

'Essays in Love', published in 1993, is de Botton’s first novel. It attracted relatively little recognition in its early days, becoming popular only after the release of the internationally acclaimed 'How Proust Can Change Your Life' (1997). Despite this, it is a good read and an excellent place to start with de Botton and his popular philosophy. It follows the course of a relationship from meeting to heartbreak, with all the niceties and tribulations of love in between. Chapters are short and divided further into concise numbered paragraphs that each relate to one of de Botton’s profundities. And there are plenty of them. Though at times the subject matter is in danger of seeming trite, de Botton writes with an eloquent simplicity and clear sense of direction, making his story consistently engaging. He is insightful and he does at times display an astonishing ability to express the intricacies of romance that leave most of us lost for words, and this saves the story from becoming romantically mundane or intellectually unmanageable, although it will undoubtedly leave those with a better-than-average philosophical intelligence tearing at their hair.

The blurb on the back says that 'Essays in Love', 'will appeal to anyone who has ever been in love’. It all sounds a bit generic, and sometimes it is. But there is something to be said for a man who successfully pulverises centuries of philosophical thought into a snappy modern love story and then sells millions and millions of copies of it in twenty different languages. I’m not quite sure what that something is, but it’s definitely worth a look.