the unbearable lightness of being
by milan kundera

this will come across as sacrilege to many, but upon a second reading, i found this book disappointing. seven years ago, when i first read it, it left me heady with its lyrical lushness and its unabashedly grandiose vistas. those things still take my breath away, and kundera's epic pronouncements on the human condition still mostly ring true. but at base, it turns out, this is still a novel about a man who can't keep his pants on around women who aren't his wife, and about a woman whose spirit is utterly wrecked by her husband's infidelities. kundera manages to weave the narrative of this commonplace scenario into a great historical moment, the fall of prague. he also manages gracefully to wrap a metaphor of symphonic composition and musical motifs around the subject of marital infidelity. but these abstractions only dull the edge of a potentially poignant subject; the intellectualization of an intensely human theme, such as betrayal, only serves to flatten it. most importantly, he fails to create compelling characters – tomas and tereza are symbols of humanity, but not convincingly human themselves. all in all, this is a book of ravishing prose, but lacking in substance – in a word, light.