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By Angelique P. Manalad, Contributor
To love promiscuously without the yoke of guilt,
to savor the illicit, to free sex from love and to find ecstasy in
rebellion, one can hardly stand being unfettered and unbound. The
Unbearable Lightness of Being, French/Czech novelist Milan Kundera
most notable work written in 1982, explores four lives intertwined
in tumultuous times.
Kundera delivers a compelling tale set in the
time of Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. The book revolves
around inner conflicts of four individuals as they search for love
and happiness. He reveals in detail the patterns that characterize
each protagonist.
A womanizing doctor finally meets someone he
can’t live without, yet is still unable to keep away from his
fascination of discovering the uniqueness of each woman he meets.
A woman painter driven by her eccentric ways and
her thirst to betray is entangled with love affairs. As the regular
mistress of the doctor, they have a deep friendship that makes them
separate their physical attractions to their emotional connection
with each other.
A young waitress finally finds her strength and
purpose in life upon meeting the love of her life, unknowingly
making her weakness her strength in making the man devote his life.
Her past haunting her being and struggling with the fear of not
being able to be the lone woman for his man, she is bothered with
meaningful dreams as she slumbers.
And finally, the painter’s other lover
abandons his family only to be abandoned himself. Yet he continues
devoting his life until his last breath to the woman he deeply
loves.
Kundera reveals insights on postmodern love and
puts to words fears and questions most often unsaid. He tried to
identify the thin line between love, companionship and domination.
He unravels the rich tapestries of the human
mind and exposes threads of human emotions—the ironic differences
between lightness and weight, lust and love, music and noise,
betrayal and fidelity, light and dark. The book provided a great
deal of help from the European art and politics as background, but
was still able to weave the fictional lives of the four protagonist,
representing each struggle to find that certain lightness of their
existence.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being reveals
tantalizing details of the human conditions, things that may
uncomfortably resemble our own lives. With each turn of a page,
you’ll find yourself engrossed, almost unbearably.
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