Mac's Backs Book Club discusses The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.
In conjunction with "Lightness of Being," ChamberFest Cleveland's 3-week chamber music festival running from June 14-July 1, we will discuss this timeless classic. More information on the festival can be found at chamberfestcleveland.com.
A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover-these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. Kundera's first since "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting." In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our private actions, but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.
"Brilliant . . . A work of high modernist playfulness and deep pathos."-- Janet Malcolm, New York Review of Books
"Kundera is a virtuoso . . . A work of the boldest mastery, originality, and richness."-- Elizabeth Hardwick, Vanity Fair
Milan Kundera is the author of the novels The Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves--all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.
The book will be available at Mac's Backs or through our website at the 20% book club discount.
Update on meeting location - We will meet at the Coventry Peace Arch at the corner of Euclid Heights and Coventry. Bring a lawn chair if you have one. Limited bench seating is available. As Coventry Road is under construction in front of the library, plan on parking on Washington Blvd. or in the parking garage across from the bookstore. Parking is free.
