The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of my all-time favorite books. It is a novel, but it is also about philosophy, music and language among other things. The novel is set mostly in Czechoslovakia, before and after the Prague Spring of 1968. The novel follows Tomas, a surgeon, and Tereza who meets Tomas while tending bar in her small town, and goes to Prague to see Tomas. Their relationship is complicated by the fact that Tomas is a compulsive womanizer. Sabina, an artist who is one of Tomas’s “erotic friendships” also figures prominently in the story.

For fear of spoilers, I really don’t want to go any further into the plot. I will say that the plot does not unfold in chronological order, so the reader knows the fates of the main characters long before the end of the book. One of the major differences between the book and the 1988 movie, is that the movie is in chronological order.

I highly recommend this book. It may seem to start slowly, but it’s definitely worth the effort to read.