| | "It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being so fascinated by mysterious coincidences...but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."
The Unbearable Lightness of Being has a magical-realist quality to it--it tells and tells, a circular sequence of events that only sometimes gives way to description. It reminded me of 100 Years of Solitude. The book had a powerful sense of dichotomy (perhaps rendered more noticeable by my own fascination with dichotomies both true and false). The most obvious of these binary pairings is lightness/heaviness, and an attempt to reconcile it with goodness/badness. More influential, however, than the dichotomy referenced in the title is that of fate/free-will. Tomas references Oedipus, the ultimate play of destiny versus choice, and throughout, the book returns to concerns of freedom--of how our actions are defined by our families, our lovers, and some other part of our selves.
This book is loaded with quotable quotes, including one that is particularly relevant to this site:
"In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out from the municipal library, and above all, the novels...They not only offered her the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others."
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| | Posted 1/3/2008 4:16 PM - 34 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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