SOURCE: “Bottom Rung,” in Spectator, June 23, 1984, pp. 29-30.

In the following review, Hawtree offers a favorable assessment of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Behind this most off-putting of titles there is a novel that, problematic and even irritating as its elliptical structure might momentarily be, exerts a curious fascination. Fitted together out of sequence by an ingenious, self-conscious writer whose sense of humour saves him from the passé indulgences of modernism, The Unbearable Lightness of Being contains characters of considerably more interest than have previously appeared in Kundera's fiction. At first, it seems that they will become submerged beneath a bale of homespun philosophy that, using people as ciphers to play out an elaborate game, recalls the worst excesses of the French structuralists. The opening pages turn around the contrast between things as they appear at the time and from a later perspective. ‘There is an infinite difference...