I was quite looking forward to this, particularly as the cover was elusive to me – a doodle of something, I’m not sure, maybe it’s a dog? And then you have the title in untidy, scribbly writing that somehow still looks a little sophisticated, like a small child trying to write neatly.
‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ What does that mean? I found myself thinking, as I caressed the cover because it was matte in texture and felt nice to touch. It made me think there must be an odd charm in what I am about to read, especially as I’d heard about it so much, I mean, I’d seen it referenced on Friends and initially thought it was actually called, as Chandler joked: ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Bean’. But alas, there was no charm, only oddness, highly uncomfortable oddness, like when a man calls you sweetheart just as he’s about to patronise you, ya know, yucky oddness.
So you have this main female character “Tereza” who is mentally unstable, because that’s women for you isn’t it? She’s Tomas, the protagonist(‘s) main lover. But she isn’t hysterical like how (the still revered, *eye roll*) Woody Allen writes some of his disappointing female characters, she’s this kind of passive hysteric and she continues to lose her mind or whatever as the book goes on, at the mercy of, it seems, well, everything… but mostly Tomas.
The whole thing is essentially about their fucked up love affair and sometimes its more focused on him, then her then some other unfortunate souls and then Kundera’s own yawn-evoking musings are peppered in too.
Glaring plot holes around Tereza’s background become apparent as you read on, namely that her mother pushed her to embrace being naked when she was younger but then later in the book shames her for it. Now this can happen with an inconsistent mother, but, seeing as the relationship was not really unravelled much further, it seemed as though it was simply an oversight because why would her story matter as much as Tomas’s? He’s the well-rounded one because he has a penis DUH.
So he’s going round fucking a bunch of women and then blabbering on about life and its set in late 60s, early 70s Prague. The soviet/ Communist regime backdrop is quite frankly, presented in the tone of a middle class elite speaking for the lowly masses (cos we’s as’ smaller brains sir, *tooth falls out*).
But forget all that because the most important part is that Tomas is going round fucking a bunch of women and that’s really cool.
Throughout the story, the reason for his unholy galavanting is that it is supposedly the only way he “connects” with women, please DON’T take notes, fellas. You can tell that the writer Kundera himself probably sees women FIRST in a sexual way and THEN, as human beings.
Tomas is shagging lots of women and being unfaithful to the poor frail Tereza and we’re supposed to like, feel sorry for him or relate to him or some shit like that.
He’s got his main mistress Sabina as well and she’s pretty much the opposite of Tereza, cold and lacking in any desire for commitment, she’s fairly successful and calm and collected and happy to be a mistress, I mean, pffft, who isn’t?
It’s almost as if the writer is trying to justify the depraved behaviour of Tomas in some attempt to uncover a taboo – you know, because we’ve never seen a man cheating before right? Ground-breaking stuff innit.
Honestly, I’d much rather read about a man who isn’t a slave to his dick, who smells like other women’s pussies – the latter is in fact, an issue for Tereza in the book which she dwells on for ages but then of course, accepts.
Tomas’s appeal is never really explained and yet women seem to just drop their panties as soon as he walks into a room; nor is any man in this book ever illustrated physically in great detail, to the extent in which the women are:
“… a woman of about thirty with a very pretty face. She had two unbelievably large, pendulous breasts hanging from her shoulders, bouncing at the slightest movement.”
“… reconciled to their size as she was, she was still mortified by the very large, very dark circles around her nipples. Had she been able to design her own body, she would have chosen inconspicuous nipples, the kind that scarcely protrude from the arch of the breast and all but blend in color with the rest of the skin. She thought of her areolae as big crimson targets painted by a primitivist of pornography for the poor.“
“It was not her lover she remembered. In fact, she would have been hard put to describe him. She may not even have noticed what he looked like naked. What she did remember (and what she now observed, aroused, in the mirror) was her own body: her pubic triangle and the circular blotch located just above it.“
“He had phoned a certain young woman about ten times. A charming acting student whose body had been tanned on Yugoslavia’s nudist beaches with an evenness that called to mind slow rotation on a mechanized spit.“
Considering the writer hasn’t got breasts he goes on about them very fucking often and so specifically and still, no such picture is painted in repeated scrupulous detail of the male form.
Funnily enough, I found the 1988 film intriguing (though it drags on for just short of three hours) as the world of the story feels much more nostalgic and less whiny because you don’t have Kundera’s holier-than-thou, pseudo-intellectual waffling over all of it.
Daniel Day Lewis gives Tomas a fitting, creepy way about him and the female characters are performed with an energy that feels alive as compared with the seedy lens through which we are forced to view them in the book.
Overall, I found this work apologetic for the hyper-sexualised images of women that exist within the minds of misogynistic, emotionally unavailable men. It is contextualised in a time of political misery and muted unrest (with a hint of contempt for all forms of Leftism in general, might I add) as if the situation justifies, even calls for, a well-paid, well educated man behaving disrespectfully (he was unfulfilled god-damn-it!) and further traumatising his vulnerable partner.
Rusty and tired, Kundera’s perspective is dead and on its corpse I hope to see new writers who are more connected to the world and create progressive depictions of relationships that are not narrated by a sobbing man of privilege making awful decisions and having women at his fingertips regardless.
It’s another “genius” male writer (with a massive emphasis on the “”) writing stereotypical female characters, because women are such mysterious, moody creatures with boobies, at one with the moon and – BOOBIES, don’t forget the boobies.
Surely today, we can do better than that ay?
Plebeian Review 