Czech exercise for readers

Press, 1 June 1985, Page 20

Czech exercise for readers

The Unbearable Lightness of Being. By Milan Kundera. translated by M. H. Heim. Faber, 1984. 314 pp. $29.50. (Reviewed by Ralf Unger) An expatriate Czech author has written a novel guaranteed to exercise the concentrating mind. The concept of eternal return propounded by Nietzsche — sometimes seen as a symptom of the increasing intrusion of his insanity into his philosophy — states that what occurs and does not return means nothing. It is lighter than feathers while return indicates nontransitoriness and the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every repetitive move we make. Further, the author uses the philosopher Kant’s categorical imperative of absolutes, and the opposition of lightness and weight, sorrow and joy, to give meaning. With these classic ideas as the recipe Kundera concocts the story of a marriage in Prague of a surgeon and a

■ waitress through the period of the ' Russian “liberation” in 1968. The ■ doctor, after not being permitted to continue in his profession because of a political indiscretion, becomes first a window cleaner, who tries to have sexual relations at least twice each day with his customers, and later a peasant. Other characters come and go, fatalistically entwined with each other and continually underlining the fortuitous nature of events leading to major developments and recurring themes that give meaning in the philosophical structure. This is illustrated even to a dying dog carrying a meat-roll in his mouth every day, displaying happy longing for such repetition. Although the underlying theme message is an unyieldingly resounding one, the content is full of humour, literary whimsical references, and verbal games culminating in a novel of worthy being. ;