author of the unbearable lightness of being

Its lightness is unbearable.Īnd this dichotomy between lightness and weight will underpin much of the discussion which follows. What occurs only once, has no weight, no meaning. He quotes the German proverb: Einmal ist Keinmal: ‘once is nothing’. Only recurrence nails something down with weight and meaning. Kundera interprets to it to mean the notion that anything which happens only once barely happens at all. Thus the first two short sections of part one of this book present no characters or settings at all, but consist of a meditation on Nietzsche’s puzzling idea of Eternal Recurrence, an idea Nietzsche proposed in his last works before going mad.

The ideas come first, and then the characters exist – or are invented – to flesh them out. Kundera’s novels feature characters, but they are more often than not presented through the author’s ideas about them. Conventional novels set scenes, paint locations, introduce characters, and explore them slowly by taking them through events, described in full, with plenty of dialogue. That said, it is still not at all like a conventional novel. Unlike that book it retreats a little from being a collection of fragmented stand-alone narratives, heavily interspersed with philosophical digressions, back towards something a bit more like a conventional novel, in that the same characters recur in every part. Like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, this novel is sharply divided into seven distinct parts.

Author of the unbearable lightness of being