The Unbearable Lightness of Being A Novel

A young Woman in Jove with a man torn between his Love for t her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover - these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is The Author of the Novels The Joke, Life is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves - all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French. Cover Design : Mary Schuck

Part I : Lightness and Weight
Part II : Soul and Body
Part III : Words Misunderstood
Part IV : Soul and Body
Part V : Lightness and Weight
Part VI : The Grand March
Part VII : Karenin's Smile