The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Book Choice for March 2019: By Milan Kundera, 1984
On the one hand, I have so many thoughts about this book, and on the other, I felt like not bothering to write about this book at all. Which is exactly the plot and point of this book, ironically.
I wasn’t sure about whether this book was worthy of being written about as one of my 12 books for the year, as my 12 books are meant to be mostly classics, or challenging reads, or things I always meant to get around to…and while this book has been described as a modern classic, it initially didn’t seem to contain enough for me to dissect here. However, what I have come to notice via writing this blog is that having more fiction on the brain IS helping me with my journey through life. The right stuff is coming into my hands at the right times, and now I will talk about this book as it impacted basically only me, and where I am with my politics at this moment, while proceeding to miss the point of this entire work (probably). But then again, when people just say the same stuff over and over again (it’s a great work, great greaty great)….don’t you get the feeling that they were not personally impacted at all? And we will all be impacted by different parts of works. Isn’t that the point?
I am definitely not a reviewer, able to speak on the technical merit of a book, or its artistry (although do those really matter if you are not impacted in any way?) I am merely a millennial, with a fixed, eternal, self-referential point, as the sun is to the earth.
Moving on. This book is about a man, name unnecessary, as he is a stand-in for the melancholy yearning-ness of life (which can also be expressed as “Damn it, why can’t I literally f*** everyone on the earth?”) But don’t worry, he has a very good try, and I don’t remember which city they lived in, must have been Prague, and by the end of the book you are literally asking yourself, “was there any woman in Prague that he left unsexed?” Likely not. But it doesn’t matter, it is part of showing you that carnal encounters are necessary somehow to living/suffering, although they are shallow, but oh wait, he is also married and THAT is deep, because like, it is?
And there is a sad woman, I do think her name is Teresa (the book is right beside me but I am refusing to check) and she is The Wife, and when I say sad I mean pathetic. She just loves Mr. Sexyman; because of course she does, women just love things because they can’t help themselves, even if they are being hurt by it every day, because do women ever grow, really? Or learn? Or have spines? No. They just wonder who their Man was with last night and internalize the tears. There is literally no other way to live in the melancholy shit that is life.
But you know, I didn’t hate reading this book. And now I will say the things that I am unqualified to say: the writing is good (?) It does keep you going. Not in a page-turner way, but while you are reading it you actually DO want to know what happens to Mr. Sex and Sad Teresa. It is well-written in the way that it really condenses huge feelings and experiences that you and I and everyone has while living life into 1-2 sentence epigrams which cause you to put the book down and stare at the wall or window for awhile. And THAT is valuable, really, above rubies, and must be the reason why people have taken to this book so much. Those scattered sentences of extremely dense meaning can only be written by having lived. I don’t remember the words being particularly beautiful, but they were certainly effective.
But I won’t read it again, I think, and I will tell you why.
This book panders to the West. (Yes, I live in the West and have a whole bag of privileges and everyday trials to show for it). But once you have woken up (see Marx, above), you have, and you can never go back. There are several times in the book that the horrors of Communism™ are subtly dropped-in, and these dark HINTS seem worse than when the charcters openly come into contact with the “stupidity” of the Czech communist regime.
There is a character in the book I will call Bowler-Hat because of some sexy routine she does with her hat, and she is an artist. But she CAN’T BE AN ARTIST under the regime, it’s just cramping her style on an existential level (by the way, yes, there was art and culture in the Soviet block countries). But you wouldn’t know it from this book, as this flighty artist woman (probably a symbol of freedom) “escapes” to other European countries where she can just keep flirtin’ around and doing not so much. Oh actually later she lives with an old couple for no apparent reason.
At another point Bowler-Hat tells a very TELLING story. It’s about how when she was a teenager growing up under Communism, the regime “forced” you (forced is not said, but implied) to do parades with your school peers. But Bowler-Hat didn’t WANT to do parades “with everyone smiling” so SHE hid in the bathroom. It was “fake” to her, ergo, it must have been fake for everyone involved. All readers living under free-market capitalism nod vigorously.
Parades are so gross.
It is interesting to me that some people just can never get over a cherished belief in their own uniqueness. They are INDIVIDUALS, never part of a (gasp, horror!) group. This short description in this book haunts me, exactly because I know it will impress many people very deeply the other way: “Can you believe it? All those jumped-up parades? Forcing everyone to dress the same and wear BIG FAKE SMILES?”
So now that you have learned almost nothing about this book, except that I would say that you COULD read it yourself and see what you get from it (and there is an amazing character named Franz who I have definitely met in real life, doomed from birth by his outrageous Euro-privilege) I will continue with a story about how this book fits in with the general trajectory of my life:
On irregular Tuesdays I give an hour of Conversational English to an older lady in town, let’s call her Diana (She’s 75 and she looks great, actually I met her in the gym!) She has had a very interesting life. She was born in Slovak and was studying in Czech when the regime changed and she had to decide to go to Germany, permanently, with her boyfriend, in just a weekend. To do that, they also had to get married that weekend. They did, and both continued their medical studies in Leipzig, in what became (that weekend I guess) East Germany, which I will refer to as the DDR, because it used to be called the Deutsch Democratic Republic, and DDR is much faster.
Anyway, this past week we met and we just chatted as usual about art (now that she is retired you just can’t keep her out of art galleries and museums and we usually talk about what she has seen and where she has been lately). And then books, and I told her that I bought my boyfriend a book called Liebe, Sex und Socialismus for his birthday (as you do) but as he read it, it wasn’t exactly what it said on the tin. Although it had been translated into German, it was a study of the love lives of people in the DDR by an English researcher, who turned out to be prey to the same West-splanations as is, it seems, everyone outside of Socialist regimes, or you could say, everyone without personal experience of them.
L,S & S is written from this stance: “Oh, well yes, these people say they were happy, but like, do they even KNOW what happiness is? Yes, they had more time for sex and relationships than we do now [because they worked fewer hours] and women seem to have had a higher level of equality in the workplace than anywhere ever before [or since]* and they weren’t constrained by childcare [all children went to free kindergartens, then free schools] but these poor people were obviously just confused and brainwashed, so we can never know.”
It is Western mantra that people in socialist regimes such as the DDR cannot have been happy.
But Diana says they were. And ya know, she was THERE. Or here, I should say.
Diana, regarding the authors of Chernobyl and LS&S: “They cannot understand if they were not here. They will not.”
(And she means will in the sense of the German verb, as “they do not want to understand.”
Diana: “Here it was very good. Everyone had a job, and the schools were excellent, very excellent.”
Already she has said one unthinkable thing in our culture: That everyone can be assured of a job and a secure income. Can you even imagine that? No, you can’t. Not worrying yourself sick every week that you could lose your job and die on the street? Sounds good to me. Also, NO ONE in the DDR was living on the street, not one person. Homelessness solved, by social programs. It’s unthinkable in our culture, truly.
But then Diana continued:
“But you know, it is always the people who make Communism not work. There are always people who don’t want it, and they make it fall down for everyone.”
Practically since birth advertisements teach us that our personal need to feel independence (which is of course a mirage in this complicated, interdependent world) trumps the right of everyone to obtain a good standard of housing, work and family life. Those last three aren’t even worth smiling in a parade for.
*Along with perspectives like Diana’s, which Western ears don’t commonly hear, I want to add the testimony of one of my Russian friends. While my own grandmother was a homemaker (and a wonderful one) with a sixth-grade education, who got married at 18 to escape an abusive father, my friend’s grandmother was a Floor Manager (over men and women) in a bustling factory. Different situations, different expectations, different opportunities, but underlying it all are different social structures.