Songs of Exile and Return

By Paul Gray

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING by Milan Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim; Harper & Row; 314 pages; $15.95

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in the U.S. in 1980, Author Milan Kundera brilliantly fused passion and playfulness. That book's collection of seven loosely related stories danced around a central, somber event: the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The resulting oppression halted the liberal reforms that blossomed during the famous Prague Spring of 1968 and eventually drove a number of intellectuals and artists, including Kundera, from their native country. Songs of exile are sad, by definition. Yet Kundera's added a comic vision capable of seeing both oppressors and oppressed locked in battle against a common enemy, the bizarre senselessness of a world in which all human choices lead to debacles.

The tale of that struggle is continued in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which seems at first simply a replication of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Again, the Soviet crackdown becomes a watershed in the experience of Kundera's people, making the past irretrievable and the future ominous. Again, the author divides his fiction into seven parts. This time, though, the connections between them are firmer. Four main characters keep reappearing, and their lives, though not always displayed chronologically, assume the extended contours of traditional love stories.

Tomas is a respected Prague surgeon in his 30s and a compulsive womanizer. A business trip to the provinces brings him in contact with Tereza, who tends bar at a local hotel. It is love at first sight as far as she is concerned, and Tomas soon finds her ensconced in his Prague apartment, not just as a sexual drop-in but as someone who evidently plans to spend the rest of her nights there. To his amazement, the prospect pleases him.

His marriage to Tereza does not curb Tomas' appetite for other women: "Why then give them up? He saw no more reason for that than to deny himself soccer matches." But Sabina, a painter who is his favorite mistress of the moment, senses a change: "Showing through the outline of Tomas the libertine, incredibly, the face of a romantic lover." Then it is 1968, a time of more violent change for the entire country. Tomas and Tereza emigrate to Zurich, where he has been promised a job in a prominent hospital. Sabina goes to Geneva and falls into a love affair with Franz, an unhappily married professor. It is her fate to shuck off the past: parents, the precepts of her Communist Youth League childhood and, in turn, all of her lovers: "What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being." The weight of existence descends on Tomas and Tereza. Homesick and upset by her husband's continued philan-gdering, she returns to Czechoslovakia, and he follows, knowing that the i authorities will forbid him to practice medicine at all.

What to make of Tomas' choice?

Philosophically, Kundera insists, -- such a question is moot: "Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third or fourth life in which to compare various decisions." Yet the emotional story reveals a kind of answer. Near the end, Tomas drives a pickup truck for a cooperative farm in a rural village. In a fit of remorse, Tereza apologizes for having dragged him back from a promising career in Switzerland, for using the weakness of her jealousy to enfeeble him. He responds, "Haven't you noticed I've been happy here, Tereza?"

Given all the trials that have preceded it, Tomas' statement seems inconceivable. Kundera has gracefully marshaled armies of evidence to prove that happiness is impossible "in the trap the world has become."

The villain is not despotic, criminal regimes (although they are thoroughly villainous) but consciousness itself:

"Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition." Yet Tomas somehow achieves the impossible.

At its most intense level, Kundera's fiction debates itself to a standstill of lucid repose. Moments of Olympian distance, in which the author shows his mortals ignorantly creeping toward oblivion, alternate with passages of stirring intimacy, with the novelist playing cheerleader, urging victories for everyone. Sabina's discarded lover Franz joins a ragtag crusade of Western intellectuals and liberal hangers-on. This entourage arrives at a remote bridge leading from Thailand to Cambodia. Someone with a bullhorn demands that the occupying Vietnamese allow doctors to cross the border and treat the Cambodian sick and wounded. The answer is silence: "In a flash of insight Franz saw how laughable they all were, but instead of cutting him off from them or flooding him with irony, the thought made him feel the kind of infinite love we feel for the condemned." The moment is pure Kundera, a triumph of wisdom over bitterness, hope over despair --By Paul Gray

EXCERPT

"All previous crimes of the Russian empire had been committed under the cover of a discreet shadow. The deportation of a million Lithuanians, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles, the liquidation of the Crimean Tatars remain in our memory, but no photographic documentation exists; sooner or later they will therefore be proclaimed as fabrications. Not so the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, of which both stills and motion pictures are stored in archives throughout the world.

Seven days in a row, Tereza roamed the streets, photographing Russian soldiers and officers in compromising situations. The Russians did not know what to do. They had been carefully briefed about how to behave if someone fired at them or threw stones, but they had received no directives about what to do when someone aimed a lens."