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Mentyrosa's Reviews > The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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There are many unbearable things in this book, none of them having to do with the lightness of being. The unbearable misogyny of this book. The unbearable self-importance of this book. I have read this book two or three times because people around me love it, and every time I get the sense that it was written by either a fifteen-year old boy or a narcissistic sociopath with a real knack for language. there is something really comic about the book (which is made incredibly obvious if you ever decide to watch the movie), especially any of the scenes related to seduction/sex. Of course there are very pretty and even poignant parts of the novel, but it is so self-congratulatory and entitled about its own prettiness, it comes off as nothing but clever, and more than a little soulless.
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Finished Reading
March 5, 2008
– Shelved
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there are plenty of books about love relationships wrapped up in violence, hatred, passion, and domination in them that are not so uni-directional and thus blatantly misogynistic. I think the difference is that they do not rely on such outdated stereotypes of gender roles (comically stereotypical!) and such rote fantasy scenarios of male domination. if we're going to talk about the love relationships being mapped onto some larger metaphor, I don't get why that has to be patterned on such an antiquated notion of the male/female dichotomy. I don't see anything honest in this book, just a failure to repress or account for or criticize the masturbatory reproduction of a male desire everybody already knows exists. And a terribly dishonest pretense that it is explaining something somehow "deep". 
No one reads a book two or three times that they hated. That makes absolutely no sense.
Even though we may disagree with this position, I think most people tacitly agree with it (perhaps we cannot even get rid of it as much as we'd like), and Kundera simply ends up being more honest in stating it clearly than most.