Books: Songs of Exile and Return

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THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING by Milan Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim; Harper & Row; 314 pages; $15.95

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in the U.S. in 1980, Author Milan Kundera brilliantly fused passion and playfulness. That book's collection of seven loosely related stories danced around a central, somber event: the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The resulting oppression halted the liberal reforms that blossomed during the famous Prague Spring of 1968 and eventually drove a number of intellectuals and artists, including Kundera, from their native country. Songs of exile are sad, by definition. Yet Kundera's added a comic vision capable of seeing both oppressors and oppressed locked in battle against a common enemy, the bizarre senselessness of a world in which all human choices lead to debacles.

The tale of that struggle is continued in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which seems at first simply a replication of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Again, the Soviet crackdown becomes a watershed in the experience of Kundera's people, making the past irretrievable and the future ominous. Again, the author divides his fiction into seven parts. This time, though, the connections between them are firmer. Four main characters keep reappearing, and their lives, though not always displayed chronologically, assume the extended contours of traditional love stories.

Tomás is a respected Prague surgeon in his 30s and a compulsive womanizer. A business trip to the provinces brings him in contact with Tereza, who tends bar at a local hotel. It is love at first sight as far as she is concerned, and Tomás soon finds her ensconced in his Prague apartment, not just as a sexual drop-in but as someone who evidently plans to spend the rest of her nights there. To his amazement, the prospect pleases him.

His marriage to Tereza does not curb Tomás' appetite for other women: "Why then give them up? He saw no more reason for that than to deny himself soccer matches." But Sabina, a painter who is his favorite mistress of the moment, senses a change: "Showing through the outline of Tomás the libertine, incredibly, the face of a romantic lover." Then it is 1968, a time of more violent change for the entire country. Tomás and Tereza emigrate to Zurich, where he has been promised a job in a prominent hospital. Sabina goes to Geneva and falls into a love affair with Franz, an unhappily married professor. It is her fate to shuck off the past: parents, the precepts of her Communist Youth League childhood and, in turn, all of her lovers: "What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being." The weight of existence descends on Tomás and Tereza. Homesick and upset by her husband's continued philan-gdering, she returns to Czechoslovakia, and he follows, knowing that the i authorities will forbid him to practice medicine at all.

What to make of Tomás' choice?