The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

I finished this book in February and I'm only writing about it now because I've struggled to put to words the feelings captured by this masterpiece. The only way I can really describe it is: nuanced.

I read this on my iPad and highlighted every line that I wanted to save. Unfortunately, Apple Book's no longer supports importing quotes and I'm too lazy to manually copy paste 180 different highlights into a blog. No more Apple Books.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera is a novel about two woman, two men, a dog, and their lives during the Prague Spring period if Czechoslovakian history.  It's deeply philosophical and at many points during the book, Kundera takes a break from narrating to delve into related philosophical tangents about how the characters feel -- it feels like a analysis of the book within the book, which is sorta meta. The book covers themes relating to infidelity (between sex and love); communism (naturally), the separation between body and soul; the philosophical nature of betrayal; fortuities/randomness;

"The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? ... When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina – what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being."

Maybe one day Apple Books lets me import my quotes and I'll paste them here. For now, all I can say is that this was one of my favorite realistic fiction reads and it brought more depth to my character than most pure philosophy books have.