Books like Novels by Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Slowness, the Joke, the Farewel

This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Slowness, the Joke, the Farewell Waltz, Ignorance, Immortality, Identity, Life Is Elsewhere. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), by Milan Kundera, is a philosophical novel about a man and two women and their lives in the Prague Spring of the Czechoslovak Communist period in 1968. Although written in 1982 the novel was not published until two years later in France. The Czech: and French: titles are more common worldwide. The Unbearable Lightness of Being takes place in Prague in 1968. It explores the artistic and intellectual life of Czech society during the Communist period, from the Prague Spring to the Soviet Unions August 1968 invasion and its aftermath. The characters are Toma, a successful surgeon; his wife Tereza, a photographer anguished by her husband's infidelities; Tomas lover Sabina, a free-spirited artist; and the secondary characters Franz, the Swiss university professor and lover of Sabina; and Simon, Tomas estranged son from an earlier marriage. Challenging Friedrich Nietzsches concept of eternal recurrence (the universe and its events have already occurred and will recur ad infinitum), the storys thematic meditations posit the alternative that each person has only one life to live, and that which occurs in that life, occurs only once and shall never occur again thus the lightness of being; whereas eternal recurrence imposes a heaviness on our lives and on the decisions we make (it gives them weight, to borrow from Nietzsche's metaphor), a heaviness that Nietzsche thought could be either a tremendous burden or great benefit depending on one's perspective. The German expression Einmal ist keinm...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=84507