Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being
£9.99
In stock
Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim
320pp
‘A modern classic … As relevant now as when it was first published. ‘ John Banville
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon: a man torn between his love for her and his womanising. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals, while her other lover stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by choices and events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance and weight – and we feel ‘the unbearable lightness of being’.
In stock
Description
‘A modern classic … As relevant now as when it was first published. ‘ John Banville
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon: a man torn between his love for her and his womanising. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals, while her other lover stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by choices and events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance and weight – and we feel ‘the unbearable lightness of being’.
Kundera’s classic provoked a whole generation, encompassing passion and philosophy, body and soul, the Prague Spring and modern America, political acts and private desires, comedy and tragedy – in fact, all of human existence.
Shamelessly clever … Exhilaratingly subversive and funny.’ Independent
About the Author
Milan Kundera, born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, was a student when the Czech Communist regime was established in 1948, and later worked as a labourer, jazz musician and professor at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Prague. After the Russian invasion in August 1968, his books were proscribed. In 1975, he and his wife settled in France, and in 1981, he became a French citizen. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and of the short-story collection Laughable Loves – all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity and Ignorance, as well as his non-fiction works The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.
About the Translator
Michael Henry Heim (1943–2012) was a Professor of Slavic Languages and comparative literature at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He was an active and prolific translator, and was fluent in Czech, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, French, Italian, German, and Dutch. His translations included Chekhov’s letters, various books by Milan Kundera, Kornei Chukovsky’s monumental 600 page Diary and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, for which he received the prestigious Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize (2005). Professor Heim’s career in the European field was crowned with his selection, over many distinguished professionals, as the translator of Günter Grass’s Nobel prize-winning work, My Century.
