The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Brilliant … A work of high modernist playfulness and deep pathos.”– Janet Malcolm, “New York Review of Books”“Kundera has raised the novel of ideas to a new level of dreamlike lyricism and emotional intensity.” – Jim Miller, “Newsweek”“Kundera is a virtuoso … A work of the boldest mastery, originality, and richness.”– Elizabeth Hardwick, “Vanity Fair”

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.