Interestingly, I stumbled across a review from someone who recently reread The Unbearable Lightness of Being, one of my favorite books.
Interesting because in the past month I’ve discussed it with two of my close friends, one who I have known for decades and one who I have known for only a couple of years, but strikingly similar men in certain respects. Both made the same assertion: it is rare to find a woman who likes TULOB. They both advanced the hypothesis that women don’t like books in which women are not “empowered”. I have been wondering if that’s true, and if so, then I am a very unusual woman indeed, because one of the reasons I love the book is the way Kundera tells the parallel stories of political and personal de-humanization. I also think it’s a very moral story, in that Tomas gets his come-uppance.
The reviewer also hit on one of the reasons I’ve always enjoyed the book:
Kundera is a man of the Enlightenment, and is not loath to champion reason over emotion, pointing out, as he has frequently done in his essays as well as his fiction, that many of the worst disasters mankind has suffered were spawned by those who attended most passionately to the dictates of the heart.
I think I’ll reread it, because it’s been a while. After I read Hayek’s Challenge.