The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

My sister, Catherine, refuses to read even Book I of Plato's Republic - and this despite my frequent proddings and protestations. Though I have never asked why not, I suspect that she, like a great many of her generation and all other generations, considers herself allergic to Philosophy. It's as though she should not dare read it for fear of bursting into hives or her throat swelling up so much as to suffocate her. Such perceived maladies have sworn too many off of "the love of wisdom."

And so we leave it up to folks like Milan Kundera to trick people into studying Philosophy against their will - dressing the ages-old discipline up as a play, a short story, or, as in this case, as a novel.

Kundera's quarry is a question of reality. What is "the real?" Is it the moments we call "light," when responsibility and concern seem to melt away as we, freed from burdens, rise slowly above the troubled world below? Or is the real world "heavy?" Are we not our truest, best, most authentic selves when life puts the screws to us and we are almost literally pushed by our burdens closer to the world on which we stand? The Philosopher calls this line of questioning "Ontology," the study of a thing's nature or origins, and she could ponder it for hours at a clip - and be ecstatic doing so.

The Philosopher wouldn't move copy, though. To do that, you have to write a story, and it's best if the story is about love. That's essentially what Kundera has done. He's written a tale of couples - Tomas and Tereza along with Franz and Sabina - and tracks the arc of their affairs through countless miscommunications, messy crossings, and an exceedingly long litany of infidelities. The couples do love each other - the author almost pulls muscles to communicate this in the face of so much evidence to the contrary - but so often one lovers affection fails to match the needs and expectations of the other. Tomas, for example, loves Tereza as though she were a gift sent to him down the river in a basket, like Moses to Pharaoh's daughter. What he doesn't seem to understand, though, is that Tereza considers sex intrinsically linked to love and struggles with Tomas' sharing a bed with so many mistresses.

Due to so much wanton sex and crushed feelings, it would be easy for The Unbearable Lightness of Being to devolve into little more than a cheap romance novel. Lucky for Kundera that love also happens to be a tried and true method of investigating and weighing philosophical truths. (Even the staid Plato wrote Symposium.) His interest in these underlying themes of lightness and weight is what saves the book from being tawdry. And it begs the reader to wonder aloud about what it is that makes them real.

We are a sneaky bunch, we Philosopher Kings. And here you thought we never left our ivory towers.