Literary criticism combined with travel writing; a beautiful look at Prague, through the lens of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Nicholas Kulish in the Travel section of The New York Times:
But “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” first published in a French translation from Czech in 1984, is no love letter to the city; it is a message from a time of oppression, and one worth carrying for perspective on a trip through Prague. Mr. Kundera submerges the reader in the undercurrents of political life, the rough passages of far-too-recent vintage and the personal repercussions of an invasive, claustrophobic time.
Tereza is climbing Petrin in a dream — a dream in which she will be executed, but only if she convinces the executioners that she seeks death of her own free will. The novel returns again and again to Tereza’s harrowing dreams, simultaneously erotic and morbid.
She and her husband, Tomas, are living through a most tumultuous period for what was then Czechoslovakia: the crackdown by the Soviet Union after Czechoslovakia’s attempt at liberalizing reform. The Prague Spring of 1968 was a brief flowering of openness behind the Iron Curtain; what followed was a trauma hidden inside the city. The novel provides a key to remembering.
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