The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera - 1984 First Edition

In 1968 Prague, surgeon Tomas navigates life with a philosophy of "lightness"—avoiding commitment, keeping love separate from sex, maintaining emotional distance. His carefully constructed world shifts when he meets Tereza, a young woman whose depth and need for meaning represent everything he's tried to avoid. Unable to abandon her despite his fear of attachment, Tomas finds himself drawn into the "heaviness" of genuine connection. Kundera weaves together philosophy, eroticism, and history, moving fluidly between the bedroom and the street, between personal betrayals and political ones. His characters wrestle with impossible questions: Is lightness freedom or emptiness? Is heaviness meaning or burden? Can love survive when two people occupy such different philosophical worlds? Exiled from his homeland after its publication, Kundera created a profound meditation on choice, chance, and commitment—a novel that asks whether anything we do truly matters, and whether the answer changes how we should live. - The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera. Translated by Michael Henry Heim Published 1984 (First Edition), Harper & Row, New York Hardcover. Approx. 6x8.5in. 314pp. Name of a previous owner on front endpapers. Otherwise in good vintage condition.