Book- The unbearable lightness of Being by Milan Kundaira

Originally written in czech. Got traslated to French and English further. Thanks to S, I got introduced to the novelist- Milan Kundaira. This novel is about five lives. Two men, two women and a dog living in the times of early 1970s at Prague Spring under the Soviet Union invasion and other forms of oppression. The lives of  Tomas, Franz, Tereza, Sabina and Karenine were described.  Written in a non linear format, the characters speak of lightness and the heaviness of being. Author begins the novel by diving into the topic of eternal recurrence of life. If life is only lived to be once, it's the lightness of life and if it's recurred there's heaviness in being. 

Tomas, Sabina live their lives seeking lightness betraying themselves and others at times, and Franz, Tereza live to escape the heaviness of life. I loved the way author carved the contrast of the lives. 

There are few paragraphs, I would love to revisit. 

"But when the stronger too weak to hurt the weak the weak had to be strong enough to leave."

"Animal est kaimal says Thomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage,

might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not

have lived at all."

"Music was the negation of sentences,music was the anti word he earned for one long embrace with

sabina yearned never to say another sentence another word to let his orgasm fuse with orgiastic thunder

of music and lulled by that blissful imaginary uproar he fell asleep"

 "when a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to pursue degrees, they have got to come up with dissertation topics. Dissertations can be written about everything under the sun. The number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words piled up in archives sadder than cemetries, because no one ever visits them not even on all souls day. Culture is perishing in overproduction in an avalanche of words in the madness of quantity.

"Just before disappearing from horizon she had slipped him Hercules broom and he had used it to sweep everything he despised out of his life. A sudden happiness, a feeling of bliss, the joy that came of freedom and a new life these were the gifts she had left him."

"The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us. Sabina was unaware of the goal that lay behind her longing to betrayal. The unbearable lightness of being-was that the goal?Her departure from Geneva brought her considerably closer to it.

"she went outside and set off in the direction of the embankment. She wanted to see the lake, she wanted to stand on its banks and looked long and hard into its waters because the sight of the flow was soothing and healing. The river flowed from century to century and human affairs played themselves out on its banks, play themselves out to be forgotten the next day while the river flows.

"The brain appears to possess special area which we call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us that makes our lives beautiful from the time he met Tereza, no woman had the right to leave the slightest impression on that part of his brain"