(Contemporary Classic) _
The Unbearble Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera / translation by MICHAEL HENRY HEIM
 
 

Cover design by Pentagram(below▼)
Cover illustration by Milan Kundera

UK price. Six pounds, ninety nine p.
KR price. Fourteen thousand won.

ISBN: 0-571-20083-4 (faber and faber)

          Through his book, Milan Kundera has conjured up the most intricate lives of the splendid characters many of us already own and therefore relate to emensely. What makes this book such a gem is it's philosophy. The first chapter explains it's richness, something I've never managed to describe in words yet have thought of often. Although the three hundred or so pages of The Unbearable Lightness of Being is enlightening and original, Part One is most memorable and out of it, Chapter One excels. The Unbearable Lightness of Being may be the one of few books which explains itself, philosophises, criticises and speculates the historically grounded and yet superficially fictional tales of Tereza, Tomas, Sabina and Franz. Subsequently, there isn't any relevence in demonstrating or clarifying existance, Milan Kundera has already written it all. Hence the many extracts and photos which will appear on this page.

>>Extract.

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche 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. We need take no more note of it than of a war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth centure, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment.
     Will the war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century itself be altered if it recurs again and again, in eternal return?
     It will: it will become a solid mass, permanetly protuberant, its inanity irreparable.
     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 inifinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.
     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.
(Part 1. LIGHTNESS AND WEIGHT - Chapter 1)

Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Sophocles' Oedipus.

Pages using Sophocles' Oedipus as a reference: 150 171 215 246 266 274