Losing Substance

...She is drawn into a fateful love for Tomas, a successful surgeon who is forced to become a window-cleaner because of an article he wrote in a Czech weekly during the Prague Spring of 1968...

...He is in love with one of Tomas' former mistresses, Sabina, an accomplished painter who strives in her art to get at what is hidden "behind the scenes": "On the surface an intelligible lie...

...It was floating down the Vltava...

...Kundera then launches into a heated disputation against vivisection and for the recognition of souls in animals...

...Again she looked down at the river...

...She understood that what she saw was a farewell...

...Kundera worries his material in a nervous, circular manner reminiscent of Mahler...

...The question of fidelity, of betrayal or commitment, has political as well as sexual ramifications...

...She turned and looked behind her as if to ask the passersby what it meant...

...Despite his very real love for Tereza, he cannot relinquish his lifelong Don Juan habits...

...Unfortunately, Kundera also lapses into fuzzy metaphysical musings...

...Substance, which used to be provided to individual lives by a sense of continuity and history, is losing its weight...

...By temper, subject and method, Kundera is a modernist...

...He holds up to scrutiny four characters whose lives cross in a kind of cat's-cra-dle, but more broadly this is "an investigation of human life in the trap it has become...

...A question," he writes in his new work, "is like a knife that slices through a stage backdrop and gives us a look at what is hidden behind it...

...She was called Lucie in The Joke, Ta-mina in Laughter and Forgetting...

...Words do not hold the same meanings for them, nor do events or things...

...But everyone passed her by, indifferent, for little did they care that a river flowed from century to century through their ephemeral city...

...Choices are often equivocal and making judgments is a tricky affair...

...And another and another, and only then did Tereza realize that all the park benches of Prague were floating downstream, away from the city, many, many benches, more and more, drifting by like the autumn leaves that the water carries off from the woods—red, yellow, blue...

...His lunacy (that is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse...

...In Tereza we meet once more one of Kundera's loveliest female incarnations...

...These "set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence...

...Nietzsche," he writes, "was trying to apologize to the horse for Descartes...

...he seems never to have done with it...

...Each life and each pairing demonstrates an attempted response to what might somewhat grandly be called "The Decline of Western Humanity...

...Whatever her name, she bears the same burden of the past as she moves into the future, yearning toward death...

...A wooden bench on iron legs, the kind Prague's parks abound in...

...The main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn't know...

...In structure, this novel adheres to the pattern of the earlier novel: seven parts, some of which mark returns to previously handled themes, situations or characters...

...Much of this entire section, supposedly the expression of Tereza's sentiments, reads like the very kitsch the author so eloquently demolished in an earlier chapter...

...Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Contributor, "Partisan Review," New York "Times Book Review" Milan Kundera, the Czech emigre author best known in this country for his The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, has turned interrogation into a literary method...

...Tereza embodies the ambiguous virtue of fidelity...

...But ultimately, the only questions worth asking are those that have no answers...

...Here he is, for example, on guilt-innocence: "Whether they knew [of the atrocities] or didn't know is not the main issue...

...Standing on the banks of the Vltava, on the outskirts of Prague, she falls into reverie: "She was staring at the water—it seemed sadder and darker here—when suddenly she spied a strange object in the middle of the river, something red —yes, it was a bench...

...beneath, the unintelligible truth...

...Meshed with the lives of Tomas-Tereza are the lives of Franz-Sabina...

...Similarly, the ponderous excursis on the musicological-metaphysical weight of Beethoven's Es muss sein, unlike the lively and fascinating colloquy on Moravian folk music in The Joke, seems labored and yields little in the way of insight or information...

...Some of the book's most lyrical passages belong to Tereza...

...He steps inside, then outside his characters, questioning their motives and—going beyond Brecht in this—questioning his own motives as well...

...We do well to listen to them...

...If the love affair between Tomas and Tereza is fraught with anguish, that between Franz and Sabina is fraught with misunderstandings...

...She was grief-stricken...

...Lightness-weight and fidelity-betrayal are only two of the many questions Kundera dissects...

...With roots in 19th-century formalism, he embodies those elements of the Central and Western European School that we may call Absurd Reality: post-Kafka and post-Brecht...

...The repeated agitating can be—as it is with Mahler—highly affecting...

...If The Unbearable Lightness of Being does not achieve levitation to the dizzying heights attained in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, it is nonetheless an achievement of a very high order...

...Hence, for all: "The unbearable lightness of being...

...The themes stick in one's head, humming themselves away...

...He inveighs against man, "the master and proprietor of nature" (Descartes), invoking the image of Nietzsche embracing a horse that has just been beaten...

...Followed by another...

...The splendid translation by Michael Henry Heim once again preserves the jerky rhythms and unique cadence of Kundera's voice...

...Franz is a renowned Swiss professor (and the book's only non-Czech character...