"The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

[fiefoe]

This is very much a novel in the European way. The author is self-consciously omnipresent - but somehow it wasn't as annoying as when Michael Faber did it in "The Crimson Petal and the White".

• Characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility..
• The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities... Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. . For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about.

<Repression / occupation:>

• The carnival (of hate) was over. Workaday humiliation had begun.
• Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends...
• The past.. had turned out to be confiscated.
• When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have a hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true... It is simpler for us to argue with him or insult him.. than to lie to his face.
• (As a window-washer), Tomas reeled through the streets of Prague from one glass of wine to the next like someone going from party to party. It was his grand holiday.
• That's how the poet Frantisek Hrubin died - fleeing from the love of the Party.
• The situation of the declasse intellectual was no longer exceptional.
• But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears.
• His choice was between playacting and no action at all. There are situations in which people are _condemned to playact.
• The exquisite noise of European history was lost in an infinite silence.

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