Milan Kundera was born April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), the son of Ludvik and Milada Kundera.

At its most fundamental level, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is about the ambiguity and paradoxes of human existence, as each person teeters between lightness and weight between the belief that all is eternal return and Nietzsche's concept that life is an ever-disappearing phenomenon and between dream and reality. Indeed there are several critics who focus their entire analysis on the way Kundera uses musical structure to put together his novel. Because the work is so complex, there are many themes that intertwine throughout the novel, just as a theme in a musical composition will be introduced only to reappear later in a different key. As an expatriate Czechoslovakian writer, Kundera draws upon his firsthand experience of the 1968 Prague Spring and subsequent Soviet occupation of his country to provide the backdrop for the story of four people whose lives are inextricably enmeshed. This magnificent novel, now available in a beautifully designed Harper Perennial Deluxe Edition, is a story of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, and encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.First published in 1984 in both Paris and New York, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a rich and complicated novel that is at once a love story, a metaphysical treatise, a political commentary, a psychological study, a lesson on kitsch, a musical composition in words, an aesthetic exploration, and a meditation on human existence. Hence, we feel 'the unbearable lightness of being' not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples, a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing, and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover.

full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond.' - People It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love.

The unbearable lightness of being novel