Czech This Out

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
It's odd, even pitiful, how soon you can run out of adjectives when you are writing one review a day. Brilliant, wonderful, insightful, masterful, paradigm-shifting, and many other effusive utterings come to mind - but none seems fresh and true to the spirit of the book. Eventually I will have to review a book I did not like so I can delve into the much more extensive vocabulary of dislike.
However, I did like this book. If you've read Hesse's Siddhartha, or the works of Camus and Bowles and some extent east-bloc communist authors like Koestler, Grossman and Solzhenitzyn, this book should strike a nerve. There is the spiritual sense of Hesse's Siddhartha - though it is subtle and far more existential in nature (hence Camus- I know, I know... ignore the contradiction of existentialist spirituality), there is the bleakness inherent in Camus' work and that of Paul Bowles, and tying it together is the rough pall of the Communist regime similar to that of Koestler, Kafka, and Grossman. Yet with all the darkness there is still light in the book, and genuine emotive power - - it makes you feel. I've read other Kundera novels and have found them equally engaging, although I feel that this one is the best.
Rating: A
Related: (only tangentially)
The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
Forever Flowing - Vasily Grossman
The Trial - Franz Kafka
The Fall - Albert Camus
The Joke - Milan Kundera