There are novels that are tragic or entertaining, and this one is both. There are very few that give a fresh perspective on existence, and force the reader to reassess his own life and attitudes. (Victoria Glendinning
in The Sunday Times
)
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch. The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a basis of kitsch. (Milan Kundera,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, translated by Michael Henry Heim)
My thoughts (roughly scribbled on a piece of paper):
The overriding impression of this book is: how not to write a novel, let alone a philosophical one. It deserves comparison with Harry Mulisch’s
The Discovery of Heaven. Both are pretentious, only Mulisch is crassly so; yet Kundera is perhaps less readable, since the pretentiousness saturates every page. In Mulisch, there are particularly ‘bad’ sections, such as the angels in particular, and the end, but the rest of the novel is to an extent free, though not completely, of authorial rubbish. At times the story actually gets caught up in itself and tells itself for a while before the author reasserts his schema. In Kundera, on the other hand, the author is present on every page, analysing, interpreting and directing the events. In Mulisch, the author interprets; in Kundera, the author obscures. In Kundera it seems the story is written inside out: normally one reads the story on the surface and then reads between the lines for the symbolism, meaning or sentiment; here the symbolism, meaning and sentiment are the surface and one has to read between the lines to find the story. It is relatively rare that the story (as such) actually comes to the surface; I was always reading the book thinking how good the film would be (if it was made like
Three Colours Blue, it could be excellent; if
Three Colours Blue were written as a novel in the manner of the Kundera book, it would be terrible.)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a philosophical novel for the unphilosophical, for the unliterary even. The two points coincide: it is written for the person who does not know how to read between the lines, and can only read what is presented to them on the surface, as if on a plate. It is in the worst sense of the word a best-seller: written in a best-seller-style for the person who cannot read a good book but wants to feel that they have read something deeper than Jackie Collins or John Grisham. They can feel they have read something demanding, flatter themselves that they have read some ‘literature’. But literature it is not, any more than Grisham or Collins. It is all surface, both in the sense of style and of content: surface philosophy, surface intellectualism, surface literature. It is thus popularism in its basest form; or kitsch by its own definition (Part 6, Chapter 8), which we can adapt as follows:
1. What a profound thought!
2. How nice it is to be able to have profound thoughts!
It is written for someone unable to access 1. at all. Kundera's philosophy may be more substantial than Mulisch's but it is still spurious. I should read Rorty to find out why he thinks Kundera so great; but it all seems decidedly second hand to me. It is far from equal to, say, Karel Čapek's
Three Novels or Thomas Mann's
Death In Venice for its development of a philosophical theme. Not, again, to deny that there is a story in there, but the story is not merely tainted (as in Mulisch) but actually thwarted by the inside-out everything-on-a-platter style.
A stylistically perverse, superficial piece of best-sellerism.
