It’s been 20 years since Milan Kundera first published The Unbearable Lightness of Being and became literature’s equivalent of a rock star. It was the kind of book that American college students thrive on—Eurotrash romanticism, haphazard pop-philosophizing, and lots of adulterous affairs with mysterious Women of the Warsaw Pact. If you wore black back then, and fantasized about booking a flight to Prague—oh romantic city!—you read Kundera. Well, we’ve all grown up since then, and the Czech writer has too, but maybe not quite as much. He still lectures his readers every other chapter, on the etymology of the word “nostalgia,” on the Odyssey , on Icelandic myths—on anything he damn well pleases. He’s not the world’s most complex thinker, nor its most poetic novelist. But this novel, about two Czech expatriates making their way back to Prague to rediscover their past—typical fare, really—is another light-handed page turner. If nothing else, Kundera will get you in touch with your own past—as a college student in black jeans, excited for the first time in your life about the passions that can be cultivated by something as simple as an earnest European hardcover.
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