Summer drifts across your bare body, dear reader, as you surrender to the luxury of reading. Your books slowly become one with the sand, their pages warming beneath the sun until every word turns the grains around you into tiny mirrors.
All books are undoubtedly worthy of our attention, but today we are going to indulge our humanity and admit to preference.
Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist, wrote the book around which our summer must revolve.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is concerned with lengths and measures as much as it is with casual affairs and even lighter emotional intimacies. None of that should trouble you yet, however, because you have not read it, and its story may initially appear rather ordinary for a novel burdened with such an unbearably heavy title.
To persuade you, I must perform the extraordinary act of overreading.
This book, dear reader, is about justice not necessarily the divine, legal, or philosophical kind, but the intimate version we construct whenever pain demands an explanation. The same justice defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “fairness in the way people are dealt with.”
An unbearably simple definition for an unbearably complicated subject.
Examples are required. After all, it is only fair.
“The same God who gave you the audacity to look at her that way
is the same God who gave me someone you would try to become.”
Divine justice.
“The same universe that led me towards that wonderful affair
is the one that first taught you to be cruel.”
Only fair.
We call these things justice because consequence alone is too unsatisfying. We need betrayal to become punishment, loss to become balance, and coincidence to resemble a verdict. We arrange our suffering into patterns because randomness rarely comforts anyone.
In much the same way, Tomáš a gifted surgeon in Prague who has severed contact with his former wife and their young son, Šimon falls in love with Tereza, a café waitress. He marries her, continues his affairs with other women, and eventually escapes with her to the West. Yet Tereza, unable to endure either exile or the emotional weight of his infidelities, returns to Czechoslovakia.
Tomáš briefly regains the independence he once believed he wanted. Then he follows her, fully aware that doing so means surrendering the possibility of leaving the country again.
Justice, dear reader.
Or sacrifice. Or guilt. Or love made unbearable through consequence.
That is precisely the difficulty.
Without revealing anything further, this novel offers far more than the flattering comfort of personal reflection. It is not particularly interested in you, and for good reason: your life is boring, and contemplating it would be about as thrilling as folding laundry.
Instead, the story turns towards the rules we repeatedly refuse to obey yet unfailingly remember whenever the tide turns against us. We reject responsibility while freedom serves us, then demand fairness the moment someone else exercises the same freedom at our expense.
Kundera does not allow you the luxury of remaining innocent. His story permits you to become the victim, the prosecutor, and the perpetrator. You may condemn one character, defend another, and eventually discover that you have occupied every moral position yourself.
The novel does not promise that the scales will balance. It merely reveals how desperately we need to believe that they might.
And all from the privacy of your bedroom.
Also read: Smart traffic lights coming to Nicosia and Limassol
