What had drawn me to Milan Kundera’s bestselling novel, unbeknownst to me when I first glanced through it in the bookshops, was its underlying existentialist nature.
Are our lives burdened by the weight of our chores and our missions, or are we burdened by life because of its very lightness, for it is afterall but a sketch, and we struggle to attach some significance to our existence? Einmal ist keinmal?
At times comical, at times tragic, at times - once too often - lusty, this is, despite its title, a heavyweight. Although only 300 pages long, it took me more than two weeks to finish this book (compared to a few days for Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy!). In its interwoven stories tracing the lives of a few entirely believable characters (including a German Shepherd), it explores some (sometimes very mature) philosophical and political themes amidst an Eastern European historical backdrop. This is not a book for everyone, but if you have the patience, you’ll definitely be rewarded.
Some excerpts:
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.
There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for 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?
Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences.
They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence int a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of an individual’s life.
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences, but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.
Being a woman is a fate Sabina did not choose. What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure. Sabina believed that she had to assume the correct attitude to her unchosen fate. To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
… living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful.
Tereza kept stroking Karenin’s head, which was quietly resting in her lap, while something like the following ran through her mind: There’s no particular merit in being nice to one’s fellow man. She had to treat the other villagers decently, because otherwise she couldn’t live there. Even with Tomas, she was obliged to behave lovingly because she needed him. We can never establish with certainly 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.
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental débâcle, a débâcle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persist by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.