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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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Format: Paperback / softback
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?
This novel is ideal for readers interested in philosophical fiction and complex explorations of love and identity within a politically charged setting. Fans of introspective and thought-provoking narratives will find it compelling.
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See moreA young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover--these are the two couples whose story are told in this masterful classic.
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Description
International Bestseller - Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
"Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond." -- People
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, acclaimed author Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples: a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing, and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. 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.
This magnificent novel is a story of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, and encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780060932138
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 07 April 1999
Country: United States
Imprint: HarperPerennial
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Weight: 0g
Pages: 320
Collections
About the Author
The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929-2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975 until his death. 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 more recent novels, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance, and The Festival of Insignificance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.
Also by Milan Kundera
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera is a profound exploration of love, politics, and existential philosophy set against the backdrop of 1960s Prague. The novel revolves around the entwined lives of four main characters: Tomรกลก, a successful surgeon and notorious womaniser; Tereza, his faithful wife; Sabina, a free-spirited artist and Tomรกลก's mistress; and Franz, a compassionate professor who...Paperback$2500Elsewhere:$2799Unit price /UnavailableBackorderShips mid September -
Identity
Sometimes - perhaps only for an instant - we fail to recognise a companion; for a moment their identity ceases to exist, and thus we come to doubt our own. The effect is at its most acute in a couple where our existence is given meaning by our perception of a lover, and theirs of us. With his astonishing skill...Paperback$2799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Ignorance
In Ignorance, Milan Kundera takes up the complex and emotionally charged theme of exile and creates from it a literary masterpiece. A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their Czech homeland in the early 1990s after twenty years of self-imposed exile. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted by...Paperback$2799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
The Festival of Insignificance
Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realismโthat's The Festival of Insignificance. Readers who know Kundera's earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the unserious in a novel is...Paperback$2600Elsewhere:$2799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Immortality
This breathtaking, reverberating survey of human nature finds Kundera still attempting to work out the meaning of life without losing his acute sense of humour. It is one of those great unclassifiable masterpieces that appear once every twenty years or so. 'It will make you cleverer, maybe even a better lover. Not many novels can do that.' โ Nicholas Lezard,...Paperback$2499Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips today -
Laughable Loves
Laughable Loves is a collection of stories that first appeared in print in Prague before 1968, but was then banned. The seven stories are all concerned with love, or rather with the complex erotic games and stratagems employed by women and especially men as they try to come to terms with needs and impulses that can start a terrifying train...Paperback$2799Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips today -
Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead
A chance encounter leads a man to spend the afternoon with an older woman, now a widow, who escaped him fifteen years earlier. Neither of them doubts that the day will end in disgust, but for one intimate moment each finds a way to overcome mortality. Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead, written in 1969 before...Paperback$1699Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Life is Elsewhere
Life is Elsewhere features a budding poet and his adoring mother at the heart of the story. This early novel by Milan Kundera explores their relationship intricately and thoughtfully, offering a profound narrative that delves into the complexities of creativity and maternal influence.Paperback$2600Elsewhere:$2799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
89 Words followed by Prague, A Disappearing Poem
89 Words, published in 1985, is an expanded version of the dictionary of sorts that readers encountered in The Art of the Novel, and comprises a fascinating and rigorous interrogation of what exile, life in another language, and the betrayals of translations entail. Prague, A Disappearing Poem, dating from 1980, meditates on questions of the culture of the 'small nation'...Hardback$2999Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Slowness
Slowness was Milan Kundera's first novel written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows him through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated in time by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and ridiculous. As Kundera's readers would expect, Slowness is at the same time a formidable display of existential analysis....Paperback$2600Elsewhere:$2799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought, the interior of a single, unique situation the understanding of which recedes from my sight into the distance. It is a book about laughter and...Paperback$2799Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips today -
The Joke
The Joke, Milan Kundera's first novel, gained him a huge following in his own country and launched his worldwide literary reputation. In his foreword, Kundera explains why this completely revised translation is the definitive edition of his work. 'It is impossible to do justice here to the subtleties, comedy, and wisdom of this very beautiful novel. The author of The...Paperback$2799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks
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