Scan barcode
ahmed_suliman's review against another edition
2.0
جميلة فكرة "العود الأبدي" لنيتشه و طرح الخفة والثقل، كذلك قياس عقدة أوديب على الاوضاع السياسية في تشيكوسلوفاكيا .. أما قياسها على حياة أسرة تيريزا لم يكن في الاسطورة من شئ،
بالنسبة للحكم على الخفة والثقل بأن وجود أحدهما ضروري لكينونة الآخر ... أتفق مع الكاتب إن كانت فكرة (مجردة) عن وجود المتضادين في الحياة على العموم وليس في حياة بذاتها؛ والقصد أن لولا الظلام ما كان النور، و لولا الكراهية ما كان الحب، ولولا الوفاء ما كانت الخيانة فثقل قيمة الوفاء مثلاً تُقارن بخفة قيمة الخيانة.
أما فلسفة وجود الوفاء (الحب-الروح) والخيانة (الجنس-الجسد) في آن واحد لشخص واحد بداعي أن الخفة تعني التحرر وأن الحياة بطبيعتها تكتمل بالمتضادات هو إباحة للعهر لا أكثر.
كان يمكن أن تكون الرواية في نصف عدد الصفحات لو اختصر الكاتب على قُرَّاءه المشاهد الإباحية التي لا فائدة لها.
بالنسبة للحكم على الخفة والثقل بأن وجود أحدهما ضروري لكينونة الآخر ... أتفق مع الكاتب إن كانت فكرة (مجردة) عن وجود المتضادين في الحياة على العموم وليس في حياة بذاتها؛ والقصد أن لولا الظلام ما كان النور، و لولا الكراهية ما كان الحب، ولولا الوفاء ما كانت الخيانة فثقل قيمة الوفاء مثلاً تُقارن بخفة قيمة الخيانة.
أما فلسفة وجود الوفاء (الحب-الروح) والخيانة (الجنس-الجسد) في آن واحد لشخص واحد بداعي أن الخفة تعني التحرر وأن الحياة بطبيعتها تكتمل بالمتضادات هو إباحة للعهر لا أكثر.
كان يمكن أن تكون الرواية في نصف عدد الصفحات لو اختصر الكاتب على قُرَّاءه المشاهد الإباحية التي لا فائدة لها.
nosferatu's review against another edition
DNF 50%. I read this because it was automatically available and my ex bf once said he loved this book. Easily one of the worst books I've ever read
r2m's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
tessalehman's review against another edition
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
novabird's review against another edition
5.0
(Between the whore’s world and God’s world, like a river dividing two empires, stretches an intense smell of urine) p. 109 This striking image for me encompasses all Kundera’s philosophical ideas bound up in one and it is that of borders demarcated by territorial piss with its particularly strong primitive/animal association. We still fight tooth and nail over the slightest misunderstandings. I think this is why Kundera gives us the part of the novel titled, ‘A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words.’
Some motifs are carried over from, ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting;’ borders, lightness, and the idyll. Others motifs that are expanded on are; privacy, guilt and the construction of social reality where it equals kitsch as explained in ”The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”
BORDERS
-The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own “I” ends) which attracts me the most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap of what the world has become.
-Light and darkness – living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina’s distaste for all extremism. Extremes meant a border beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
-For Franz, he associated light with the familiar metaphors; the sun of righteousness, the lambent flame of the intellect. Darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, visionless; that darkness without end, without borders, that darkness was the infinite we each carry within us (Yes, if you’re looking for infinity, just close your eyes!)
With these opposing visual standpoints, Kundera makes clear that our trap is how we envision our world in either a liberal or a conservative/traditional light as boundaries that have stood in opposition to each other, as each of the two couples stand in contrast to each other. We first define our world in terms of what is opposite.
THE RETURN
-The idea of eternal return, is a perspective of the disappearance of the mitigating circumstances, of their transitory nature. The mitigating circumstances prevent us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? For everything in this world, everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything is cynically permitted.
Using the example of cynical permissiveness, Kundera points out contemporary issues of relativity, where opposites are meant to blend into greater harmony but end up nullifying each other. Two of some of the issues of relativity are guilt and privacy. How does one then attach/attribute guilt? How can we account for our relinquishing of the rights to privacy - if truth is relative, than what right do we have to hold onto the origins of truth found in the private perception of our own minds?
Kundera tells us that, “The bowler hat represented a semantic meaning: each time the object would give rise to a new meaning, though all former meanings would resonate together with the new one. Each new experience would resound, each time enriching the harmony.” In this way, Kundera clues the readers into the fact that writing and reading both perform the true function of the eternal return in creating a multitude of interpretations.
GUILT
-We have no idea anymore what it means to feel guilty.
-(After Tereza leaves Tomas) Suddenly his step was much lighter. He entered Parmenides’ magic field: he was enjoying the sweet lightness of being (Guilt free)
-If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.
-As a result of your not knowing, this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries perhaps, and you shout that you have no guilt?
PRIVACY
-Several parts of the novel make use of a concentration camp as a symbol for loss of all privacy.
-When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?
-In the world of immodesty, the world is nothing but a vast concentration camp of bodies, one like the next, with souls invisible.
-Living in truth – keeping a public in mind, means living in lies. And a man who gives up his (privacy) own free will is a monster.
Kundera’s expresses his concern with relativity, “If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearable light."
KITSCH, and the CONSTRUCTION of REALITY
-Kitsch equals the construction of social reality.
-When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
-Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
Tomas's epithet, "He wanted the kingdom of God on earth," does Tomas an injustice, since he did not want a kingdom on earth; he wanted messy imperfection, shit, individuality, and no kitsch. The last words on his tombstone are a misrepresentation and instead represent that which he detested most, kitsch. This is where Kundera refers to kitsch as the last stopover between being and oblivion. It is found in how we are remembered after death.
If Tomas and Tereza are also characters for whom Kundera expressed his pushing of boundaries,
-The longing for paradise is man’s longing to not be man. Human time does not run in a circle it is linear. That is why man cannot be happy; happiness is the longing for repetition. In an idyllic setting even humor is subject to the sweet law of repetition.
The dark humor is obvious with reference to Karenin
If the good and strange affliction that bound, ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,’ was empathy, the hallmark of, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is expressed by Tomas when he thinks, “He was being tortured (not by love but) by compassion” (for Tereza.)
I began with an allusion to animals pissing to mark their territory. I will end with animals.
-The Nietzsche I love is the one that burst into tears for the flogged horse, just as I love Tereza with the mortally ill dog resting in her lap.
Without knowing the relationship between suffering and compassion, we are lost.
Some motifs are carried over from, ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting;’ borders, lightness, and the idyll. Others motifs that are expanded on are; privacy, guilt and the construction of social reality where it equals kitsch as explained in ”The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”
BORDERS
-The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own “I” ends) which attracts me the most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap of what the world has become.
-Light and darkness – living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina’s distaste for all extremism. Extremes meant a border beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
-For Franz, he associated light with the familiar metaphors; the sun of righteousness, the lambent flame of the intellect. Darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, visionless; that darkness without end, without borders, that darkness was the infinite we each carry within us (Yes, if you’re looking for infinity, just close your eyes!)
With these opposing visual standpoints, Kundera makes clear that our trap is how we envision our world in either a liberal or a conservative/traditional light as boundaries that have stood in opposition to each other, as each of the two couples stand in contrast to each other. We first define our world in terms of what is opposite.
THE RETURN
-The idea of eternal return, is a perspective of the disappearance of the mitigating circumstances, of their transitory nature. The mitigating circumstances prevent us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? For everything in this world, everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything is cynically permitted.
Using the example of cynical permissiveness, Kundera points out contemporary issues of relativity, where opposites are meant to blend into greater harmony but end up nullifying each other. Two of some of the issues of relativity are guilt and privacy. How does one then attach/attribute guilt? How can we account for our relinquishing of the rights to privacy - if truth is relative, than what right do we have to hold onto the origins of truth found in the private perception of our own minds?
Kundera tells us that, “The bowler hat represented a semantic meaning: each time the object would give rise to a new meaning, though all former meanings would resonate together with the new one. Each new experience would resound, each time enriching the harmony.” In this way, Kundera clues the readers into the fact that writing and reading both perform the true function of the eternal return in creating a multitude of interpretations.
GUILT
-We have no idea anymore what it means to feel guilty.
-(After Tereza leaves Tomas) Suddenly his step was much lighter. He entered Parmenides’ magic field: he was enjoying the sweet lightness of being (Guilt free)
-If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.
-As a result of your not knowing, this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries perhaps, and you shout that you have no guilt?
PRIVACY
-Several parts of the novel make use of a concentration camp as a symbol for loss of all privacy.
-When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?
-In the world of immodesty, the world is nothing but a vast concentration camp of bodies, one like the next, with souls invisible.
-Living in truth – keeping a public in mind, means living in lies. And a man who gives up his (privacy) own free will is a monster.
Kundera’s expresses his concern with relativity, “If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearable light."
KITSCH, and the CONSTRUCTION of REALITY
-Kitsch equals the construction of social reality.
-When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
-Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
Tomas's epithet, "He wanted the kingdom of God on earth," does Tomas an injustice, since he did not want a kingdom on earth; he wanted messy imperfection, shit, individuality, and no kitsch. The last words on his tombstone are a misrepresentation and instead represent that which he detested most, kitsch. This is where Kundera refers to kitsch as the last stopover between being and oblivion. It is found in how we are remembered after death.
If Tomas and Tereza are also characters for whom Kundera expressed his pushing of boundaries,
Spoiler
I don’t think he meant for us to view the idyllic happy ending as the ideal. I think he meant it to be viewed as a longing for a fantasy fulfilled.-The longing for paradise is man’s longing to not be man. Human time does not run in a circle it is linear. That is why man cannot be happy; happiness is the longing for repetition. In an idyllic setting even humor is subject to the sweet law of repetition.
The dark humor is obvious with reference to Karenin
Spoiler
“Standing there watching him, they thought once more that he was smiling and that as long as he kept smiling he had a motive to keep living despite his death sentence.” That we as humans even impose the kitsch of anthropomorphizing the human expression of happiness and motivation, on a suffering and dying dog; that it too must somehow contemplate its own mortality, is simply as Kundera points out the ridiculous thinking with which kitsch stamps on our rational minds. In contrast to mortality, Kundera has Karenin think he, “felt compelled to share his overwhelming joy, a joy of return and rebirth.”If the good and strange affliction that bound, ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,’ was empathy, the hallmark of, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is expressed by Tomas when he thinks, “He was being tortured (not by love but) by compassion” (for Tereza.)
I began with an allusion to animals pissing to mark their territory. I will end with animals.
-The Nietzsche I love is the one that burst into tears for the flogged horse, just as I love Tereza with the mortally ill dog resting in her lap.
Without knowing the relationship between suffering and compassion, we are lost.
frasro's review against another edition
1.0
I loathed the main characters, Tomas and Tereza. Their relationship was so frustrating. However, Sabina was very interesting and she got me through this book!
literatefox76's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
sixmoss's review against another edition
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0