7-Minute Book Summary: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera

As of July 2021, I’ve read more than 1,000 books.

One of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life (besides getting a library card) was to take notes on every single book I read, which I’ve done faithfully ever since I started counting the number of books.

So here on Medium (and on Patreon) I’m going to keep sharing my notes and summaries, because it would be a damn shame to keep everything I’ve learned and wondered at from more than 1,000 books all to myself.

Below are my best notes from the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera, which was the 974th book I’ve read on my way to 1,000!

I would classify this an existentialist novel, and it deals with the intertwining lives of several individuals — involved in something like a love triangle, but considerably more complicated than that — and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1968 by the Soviet Union.

Kundera has denied that his novels contain any deeper meaning or ideas, but this one quite explicitly centers around Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought experiment of the…