Insupportable Lightness to be it

Insupportable Lightness to be it ( Czech Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí in ) is a Romance of Milan Kundera, written in 1982 and published for the first time in 1984, in France. It is about the fifth novel of Kundera.

The intrigue, which is at Prague in 1968, is articulated around the life of the artists and the intellectuals in the context of the Czechoslovakia of the Printemps of Prague, then of the invasion of the country by the the USSR.

Topics

Insupportable lightness to be it turns around several topics but place in the center of all the purely invented characters which incarnates great ideas, Tomas is sought under its double mask of the libertine and of in love impassioned, Tereza seeks the pure love, it is most moral of the book, Sabina is lightness; etc…

Main characters

Divided into volumes: surgeon libertine living in Prague, which becomes then window cleaner and finally truck-driver.

Tereza : former waitress of a small coffee of countryside where Tomas will meet it. She will be in turn waitress, photographer, waitress and woman of farm.

Sabina : favorite mistress of Divided into volumes, artist par excellence, libertine, will learn photography with Tereza and will pose even for it naked. (it is the character more " immoral" history, perhaps even that which incarnates in a certain Kundera way, it is partly it which describes and explains Tomas with the reader).

Franz: husband of a woman holding a gallery abroad where Sabina will expose after being flees of Czechoslovakia, will have adventures with Sabina and will leave even his wife for Sabina which wanting to be always free left for America.

Lightness and Gravity

These two concepts found the book, lightness it east Tomas and Sabina, which seek the pleasure, freedom, without never falling into passion even if they have feelings one for the other. They are attached to nothing, not having a way of thinking pertaining to an unspecified party, they are of advantage for freedom in all the directions of the term. Gravity, it is all the reverse, one sticks to beings, principles, one thinks according to a morals, all that it is Tereza and Franz.
But lightness is sometimes so important that it becomes insupportable about it. For Kundera, we live, in occident, in a world of lightness, this one becoming insupportable , contrary to Soviet, who them was of such a gravity that it became ridiculous about it. After having written on gravity in the Joke , Kundera written on lightness.

Kitsch

" the kitsch, essentially, is the absolute negation of the shit; in the literal sense as with the illustrated direction: the kitsch excludes from its field of view all that the human existence has of primarily unacceptable. " One finds a critic of Kitsch which is " the station of correspondence enters the being and the oubli". Kitsch, it is to some extent what is moral, but also what is very artificial. Kundera defines it as a veil of decency which one throws on the shit of this world. It is used by all the great ideologies, it exists the " kitsch catholic, protesting, Jewish, communist, fascistic, democratic, feminist, European, American, national, international"

Adaptation to the cinema

A film adaptation of Insupportable Lightness to be it was carried out in 1988, by Philip Kaufman.

External bonds

In connection with the work of Kundera

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