The Unbearable Lightness of Being | A Deep Dive

[@GinaStanyerBooks]

This video should be titled “how to do a book review on KZbin”. It’s fantastic and smart.

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

🥹🥹🥹 Ginaaa, thank you ❤️

[@ClaireReadsBooks]

The insights! The editing! This is the exact brain scratch I needed today … on my way to read all these articles you cited!

[@jeremiahbok9028]

What an absolute joy. This felt less like a typical review and made its way into mini-lecture territory, which I am here for. I appreciate all the clips and the graphics. This book has sat on my shelf for some years. It sounds like it's very different from what one expects from the cover, but I think it is now on my 2025 tbr. Please give your cats an extra stroke when you pet them from me. I am so, so happy you're uploading.

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

Haha "mini-lecture territory" is exactly right! My other videos won't quite be like that, because I honestly don't have enough knowledge/context about most books to even give people that much extra information. But yeah, with the Czech ones I definitely end up giving lecturer vibes 😉

[@27apus]

Oh wow, thank you for this! I should reread this book. I had a strange experience reading it the first time. For context: I am Hungarian, and read this, more than ten years ago (in my twenties) in English. I normally did not read translations into English at the time, especially not Central/Eastern European writers. But I picked up a copy in New York from a book stand, without thinking too much about it. I normally do not translate sentences in my mind to Hungarian. However, there was a passage that just did not read right. I thought of how I would say that in Hungarian, and suddenly, a world of connotations clicked into place. I wish I remembered what the passage was. Thank you for this lovely deep dive. I shall try and find myself a copy, in Hungarian this time, and read it again soon. - Anna

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

This is such an interesting memory. If you do happen to remember the specific passage at some point, I'd be curious to hear what it was! And I'd also be curious how different the initial English-language experience is from your Hungarian-language experience the second time

[@1book1review]

Okay, I totally missed a lot of these things as well. Thanks for making this.

[@janetaylorparris]

Bravo, Jennifer. I enjoyed all the critical perspectives you pulled from (esp about Western European, American and Eastern European novels) and I feel so excited to reread this now! I gave it an earnest try at 14, a bit too young to grasp anything meaningful! Please keep posting! KZbin needs more intellectually vibrant discussion like this. 🤗

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

Wow, 14 is EXTREMELY ambitious, I wouldn't have been able to process a blessed thing about this book at that age 😂. I'm so glad you enjoyed this format; I know it's not for everyone, and that less detail might do better algorithmically, but I can't help myself

[@annapajmel5843]

My mother was only 11 years old when Russian tanks passed through a holiday resort town in Poland, where she was staying with her sister and mother. She witnessed those tanks heading towards Czechoslovakia (as it was known then) and still vividly remembers the traumatic impression it left on her. People in Poland at the time feared the outbreak of another war, and the tension was palpable. This memory has stayed with her to this day.

[@xgrayvision]

Yeah-this is the content we've been missing 😄 Haven't actually read this book (did see the movie years ago), but will have to put it on my list for 2025. (Seems much more interesting than I recall the movie being) An excellent start to your new KZbin adventure!

[@thegooglevideoer]

Can't wait for the Bohumil Hrabal deep dive!

[@goddessdster]

I read this novel in my 20s not long after the movie came out. The one part that always stuck with me is Sabine’s discussion about cemeteries, most likely because I (in true New Orleans punk youth tradition) was reading that section in a cemetery. I will confess my understanding of the narrative was as thin as everyone else’s who did not have the level of understanding needed. At that time, I liked the novel’s vibes, but moved onto other reading rather quickly without being super affected. I truly appreciate this deep dive with critical analysis! Do more!

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

It really is such a vibes-based book! Especially when you're reading it in a cemetery 😂

[@mikegseclecticreads]

Really wonderful and subtle discussion! I'm sure you put a ton of work into this deep dive and it shows, so I hope lots of people watch it and learn something from it. I haven't read this book yet myself but I did read one of Kundera's I think lesser-known works "Slowness" and found that one really intriguing, enjoyed it a lot while reading. Interestingly though I also later read an analysis of that novella that suggested some of the key literature the narrator referred to in that work was also deliberately misrepresented, as if to make fun of the narrator and perhaps also the reader -- sounds similar to some of the criticism you cited here. But yeah, I'm not really sure what to make of this given that we gullible Western readers (myself included) aren't generally picking up on such subtleties. I'll read it eventually but with some healthy skepticism... Looking forward to seeing what else you have coming up!

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

I really appreciate that! I wanted to put a lot of work into this because it's what I tend to think of as a "resource" video--something that will hopefully be a long-standing reference for whoever happens to want it in the coming years. But yeah, I think there are some things I probably could have noticed about Unbearable Lightness with closer/more agile reading, but overall, if a writer intentionally tricks you, what are you to do? It's tough to approach a book naturally with the level of skepticism that Kundera wants in the reader; there's no feeling of mutual trust when there are this many games going on

[@crypsid]

Such an intelligent analysis; here's hoping that more discussions like these will come soon!

[@BookishTexan]

Thank you for this.

[@brendanmchugh473]

This is the video about this book I have been waiting for!!! Learned so much and am excited to revisit this book at the beginning of 2025 (my usual reread time).

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

I'm so glad it was helpful! Thank you for stopping by!

[@gaildoughty6799]

Excellent review, Jennifer. I’ve had this on the TBR for a long time. You’ve made me move it up the list to January.

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

I love that! I wonder what you'll think of it!

[@angelawebb7676]

I’ve not yet read the book. It’s on my shelf. I doubt I’ll ever be able to analyze it nearly as well as you have. I just came here to say you are great on camera!!! I’ll comment again when I have something more substantive to say.

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

Being on camera isn't always the easiest experience, so I really appreciate this!

[@TimeTravelReads]

Wow. This was a great review. Thank you.

[@readerwoman]

While I knew about Kundera since the 80’s, it was only after I watched the movie about 10 years ago that I read the novel. The movie was so incoherent that I felt as though I needed to read the novel to understand what was going on. Imagine my surprise encountering a philosophical treatise rather than a conventional novel! I have read it a second time … but wish that I had seen your review first. Appreciate the historical and biographical expositions, as well as reviews. But I have a love for the book and its philosophy, which has left me with my own personal perspective on life and choices. Since living our lives only allows us one opportunity to make a choice, we have to be kind to ourselves and others when our choices prove to be wrong, as well as to forgive ourselves for our mistakes as well as forgiving the mistakes of others when possible. Thanks so much for your excellent video!

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

Your assessment of the movie as "incoherent" made me laugh out loud! I think it's a positive thing that we take our inspiration wherever it comes, regardless of any author or artist's exact intentions. I personally have always been inspired by the "Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words," because it's such a useful concept for later-stage love, even if Kundera didn't necessarily intend it that way :)

[@prometheus-school-of-running]

This video is brilliant. One comment said 'mini-lecture', and yes it very much feels like that. For Kundera, to me his work feels close to someone like Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), with difference that Adams would take few pages to set up a joke, and he liked having aliens in his stories. Kundera would find same joke funny, only he would take 50 pages to set up, and there would be passages about history and philosophy. Essentially both of them are doing very similar thing. I might be wrong, but this is the vibe I got while reading them.

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

Thank you very much. I've never read Hitchhiker's Guide, but I think your Kundera description is spot-on, so I trust your Adams one as well

[@kinczyta]

GASP the montage, the quality!!

[@OjaswiShxrma]

I loved that this video actually expanded on some of the finer parts of the book instead of regurgitating things any half decent reader could pick up on (no shade lol)

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

I really appreciate this, because I accidentally stumbled upon some Kundera videos after I posted mine and I was low-key a little surprised by how…surface-level they were? The vibe was very much “here is a Great Philosophical Man and here is his Great Philosophical Book” without much more to it. So I’m relieved to hear that mine isn’t coming across that way!

[@PhantomSmarties]

Fantastic review, i literally just finished it today and your review really helped me reframe my understanding of the novel (especially coming from a western perspective)

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

Wow, our timing is incredible! I really appreciate you watching the video, especially with the book so fresh in your mind

[@PhantomSmarties]

@@InsertLiteraryPunHere I was looking for exactly this type of review and there it was posted 3 hours ago! Thanks again and keep making great videos :))

[@shresthachatterjee1707]

Kundera's writing never sparked joy within me. But your analysis and discussion makes me want to give it a second try. I will. ❤

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

Kundera is kind of a weird case because he sparks joy for me on a technical level (I think he's a really accomplished writer structurally), but he's never sparked that much joy for me thematically!

[@TheBookBully]

I read this a few years ago and really enjoyed it. Thanks for all the context and history around the novel - now I am curious to read it again.

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

It really is an enjoyable book, isn't it? I was aware while I was filming that the process of explaining this book makes it sound a lot more convoluted than it is when you're actually experiencing it 😅

[@nikkivenable73]

Omg I’m reading this for the first time after having it on my shelf for years! Perfect timing for this review! Thanks, Jen!

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

I LOVE this timing! Really curious what you think of it

[@davydex4375]

This is the one book that I've reread the most.

[@OldBluesChapterandVerse]

Of all the novels I’ve ever read multiple times, this is the one that felt most radically something else the second time I read it. I’ve been putting off my third reading of it for almost 20 years now so as to give myself time to have sufficiently changed to welcome yet another entirely different book.

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

Jason! It's so nice to see you here! Do you remember what the major differences were between your first and second readings of this book? I'm curious, because I myself was really surprised to experience something so "radically something else" the second time around

[@OldBluesChapterandVerse]

@ It’s been so long (23 years since my first read, 18 years since my second), but if I remember correctly the novel felt like a treatise on - and goad toward - sexual independence and the construction of personality the first time, whereas the second time it felt like a critique of sexual independence and a celebration of the mysteries of love and interdependence. The second read was for a class in grad school, and one of my classmates had a similar experience - she had first read it maybe a year earlier and then again for the class, and her second experience with it also felt radically different.

[@lkkubono]

Indepth review to the point I'm going to have to watch it again. I'm putting the book on my 'to re-read' list and I'm going to get a lot more out of it, although I loved it in my 20's.

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

Welcome to the "loved it in my 20's" club! I'd be so curious to hear where you end up the second time around

[@vaoannou5988]

Excellent, can't wait for your next videos! Could you recommend some online publications for interesting literary criticism articles that put things in perspective just as you tried to do?

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

Thank you so much! Some outlets I like are LARB, Words Without Borders, and Asymptote. But to be honest, most often I come across articles randomly because my friends have posted about them; I wish I were more intentional about reading from specific journals, but I've never been great at forming that habit

[@vaoannou5988]

@InsertLiteraryPunHere i'll check them out - they seem like a good place to start! Once again, it's great to have you back

[@jackiesliterarycorner]

I enjoy your reviewing style, because you sound like you know what you're talking about and understand the text thoroughly, and I would like to use your reviewing style for inspiration. I particularly have been motivated to use this style for my reread of Noli Me Tangere by Jose Rizal. It's about a young man returning to the Philippines after a few years abroad, for his education, during Spain's colonization of the Islands during the 1500s. I made the mistake of not reading the history first, and even though I enjoyed the book, if I had read "A History of the Philippines" by Luis H. Francia, first about the events Rizal was writing about it would have enhanced my experience.

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

It's tricky, because adding nonfiction is ideal and definitely does enhance other types of reading, but often it's not realistic to pair all of our fiction reading with nonfiction, you know? For Kundera specifically, I have a lot of context about Czech history and culture because that's my area of study, but I'm completely at sea when reading novels set in other areas of the world. Anyway, I really like the sound of the Philippines-related books you mention here!

[@jackiesliterarycorner]

@@InsertLiteraryPunHere I feel like I should have been learning about the Philippines since that's where my grandmother.

[@ianp9086]

Thank you for a fascinating exploration of this book. I read it in 1987 (and even knowing that tells you everything! - I know where I was when I read it!) so mid 20s, and my response was similar to your first reading and it has remained as one of my favourites ever since. So perhaps I should reread it! Having read a lot of his essays on the novel and translation he is certainly an author who takes the form and structure of the novel very seriously, and The Joke had to go through 3 translations into English before he was satisfied with it. TULOB is sometimes viewed as part of a trilogy with the Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Immortality - do you have any thoughts on this? I seem to remember the narrator of Immortality at some point wants to call the book TULOB but says he can’t because he already wrote that one! Those quotes from Mikanowski were really interesting to me. Alongside my reading of Czech authors like Kundera, Skvorecky and Hrabal my other favourite books at the time were by the Latin American boom authors like Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa and Cortazar. They seemed to me to have things in common and I can at last see why - Mikanowski’s description of the Eastern European novel showing the capriciousness of fate, inescapability of history and the absurdity of life I think perfectly describes much of Latin American literature of that time, especially the novels of Garcia Marquez, though I think it has moved on from that now.

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

I agree, the Mikanowski piece helped me mentally arrange certain things that I'd only felt instinctively before. And yes, Kundera is absolutely notorious in translation circles for how poorly he treated his translators 😅. I have conflicting feelings about it--on the one hand, he was an excellent reader across several languages, including English, and I trust his assessment that Heim's translation of The Joke veered too far toward satire. Nobody knew the feel of that book better than Kundera did. But also, would he have EVER ceded that kind of ground with the Czech language? If the situation were reversed, my instinct is that he would have been offended if a foreigner considered himself more proficient in the subtleties of Kundera's native language than he himself was. And how he spoke about Heim also makes me uncomfortable, considering what a champion Heim was for his work, and what an accomplished translator he was overall. I think that personality-wise, it was hard for Kundera to criticize someone without it coming across as extremely biting, however fair that criticism may have been

[@zissizalana6850]

Jeden z moich ulubieńców.

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

I have several Polish friends who absolutely love this book as well!

[@Abuamina001]

Kudos. An excellent review. Please consider reviewing "Hadji Murat" by Leo Tolstoy and "Death and the Dervish" by Mese Selimovic.

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

Thank you, and I appreciate these recommendations!

[@reaganwiles_art]

I love I Served the King of England, Hrabal. He is one writer whom I will try to fit into this 50-yrs-old, limited-life-left-so-why-read-it-away life . . . . Haven't read this one but saw the D.D. Lewis/Juliette Binoche movie years ago. It was uggy, Lewis' character was uggy. Good job rebranding. Glad you're back.

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

Thank you! I'll be talking a little about Hrabal in an upcoming video; he's definitely a writer that I personally prefer to Kundera

[@TonysBoardLife]

As someone interested in the history of Eastern Europe particularly 1945-1990 Could you recommend some literature from the region that will help with my historical understanding. As a historian, I can read history books and primary sources without an issue but I would love to find fiction that can help my understanding of the people from behind the Iron Curtain. I did pick up The Unbearable Lightness of Being to read because of this video. By the way, I need an English translation. Thanks and keep up the videos.

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

Absolutely! I’ll be mentioning a number of additional books from Central and Eastern Europe in future videos, but for now here are some good novels to potentially start with: Katalin Street by Magda Szabó (Hungarian); Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal (Czech); Wasted Morning by Gabriela Adameșteanu (Romanian); and The Fig Tree by Goran Vojnović (Slovenian). Embers by Sándor Márai (Hungarian) is also great but falls slightly outside your window (it was published in 1942). And two memoirs if you’re interested: After the Wall by Jana Hensel (East German) and Free by Lea Ypi (Albanian).

[@TonysBoardLife]

@InsertLiteraryPunHere awesome thanks

[@pennPi]

Great thorough review! I want to read it again and have a different experience. I read it during my first year of college and thought it was misogynistic. This was about 20 years ago,and I don’t remember this book at all. Nothing comes to mind, only that I didn’t like it for that reason.

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

It's so interesting, because I think the misogyny in Kundera's books is a major reason that he's fallen out of favor over the last decade or so, especially in university courses. I'll be talking about this in an upcoming video, but I honestly prefer Kundera's first novel The Joke because it's told in first person, which I think helps make it less grating when it comes to gender. So I'd recommend that one if you're interested!

[@mrlsrugby]

Never read the book but I am seated anyway!!

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

You're an absolute hero! Thank you for sticking with me, especially given that you haven't read the book :)

[@Sthemingway]

Have you seen the 1988 film adaptation directed by Philip Kaufman and starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, Lena Olin, and Derek de Lint? It's been ages since I've watched it and haven't read the book. I'm curious about how effectively any scenes from the film adequately or perfectly capture passages from the source material.

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

I've never seen the movie; I've always heard such mixed things about it. I think Kundera hated the adaptation (but to be fair that man was notoriously hard to please, so I don't know how much we can really take from that 😉)

[@zubaerchaudhari8267]

Hello there hey there hey Hello

[@MatthewSciarappa]

Can’t wait to reference and send this video to so many people 😌🤍

[@nikkivenable73]

Why did you delete all of your reviews?😢