Monday, April 15, 2013

Street Book - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Found - at the CAN MOCAMP in Kas, Turkey
Picked Up Because - This was a book in English!

This novel written in the mid 80's is told through a interesting point of view. From the start the athor let's the reader know that it is just a story and the people in it just characters. The "story" of these fake people is told around very real historical events that happened in Prague starting with the Russian occupation the spring of 1968. A film of this book was made in 1988 with Daniel Day-Lewis cast as the books womanizer who lives for his work as a surgeon, but falls for a young woman with unstable dreams that he makes his wife. This does not stop the sex he craves with many other woman to fill his intellectual thirst. One of this mans lovers is a strange Artist that has a reason of her own for her over sexed lifestyle. The Arthur has a tendency to take small timeouts from his lovers lives to explain the human mind and how we may see the acts of fate by using philosophy and other rants. Is the world "Light" to some and "Heavy" for others? Is the feeling of lightness a reaction to being free? Or just a symptom of the mind that wants to fit feeling with fact? In this book these are not questions that can have a answer, just ways to help the fake lives of these people seem more real. Some parts of this Novel one will read twice just to let it all soak in and that is what makes this a great book.