From the beginning of Milan Kundera's writing career—and even in his early short stories—he has been addressing the problem of how, in [Virginia] Woolf's formulation, the 'granite' of ideas can sit comfortably beside the 'rainbow' of poetic truth, and in ['The Unbearable Lightness of Being'] he has triumphed, though at some cost; a metaphysical inquiry into the nature of fate and two love stories, related with Kundera's usual blend of scepticism and compassion, are united in a lucid novel whose exhilarating pessimism is subtly, and perhaps confusedly, challenged by the warmth of the telling.
It is partly the very nature of Kundera's ideas that prevents them from smothering the vitality of this novel, and partly the way he presents his characters. His agnosticism and nihilism allow him a freedom, an absence of commitment, which her passionate feminism denied Virginia Woolf in 'The Pargiters.' The lightness of Kundera's title refers to the insubstantiality, the meaninglessness of an event, or a life, if it cannot be repeated again; transitoriness denies validity to an event, prevents us coming to a verdict. Everything can be 'pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.' Lightness in individual lives suggests a freedom from fate, obligation, truth, soaring into the heights—a flight into insignificance. Lightness is associated with vertigo—the desire to fall, to be weak, to yield responsibility.
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