<TABLE cellSpacing=0 width="100%" border=0 blogpost?>

<TR>
<TD class=ellipse><STRONG><FONT color=#2222dd>Between two extremities</FONT></STRONG></TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD class=bvh8><STRONG></STRONG></TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD>
<DIV><FONT face="Geneva, Arial, Sans-serif" color=#cc3333><EM>Title: The Unbearable Lightness of Being</EM></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Geneva, Arial, Sans-serif" color=#cc3333><EM>Author: Milan Kundera</EM></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Geneva, Arial, Sans-serif" color=#cc3333><EM>Nationality: Czech</EM></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Geneva, Arial, Sans-serif" color=#cc3333><EM>First Publishing Year: 1984</EM></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Geneva, Arial, Sans-serif">-------------------------------------------------------------------------</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman, Times, Serif" color=#ccffff></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman, Times, Serif" color=#6655aa size=4>To read a book for the first time is to make the acquaintance of a new friend; to read it a second time is to meet an old one. It's quite true though I just read it once around three years ago. It's Kundera's most famous novel. Set against the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the story evolves around different fictional topics but could just as well be the story of real people. A man torn between thought and emotion, between love and lust. A woman who lives for love. Another who lives the first thing for rebellion, the second for love or sensual pleasures. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman, Times, Serif" color=#6655aa size=4></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman, Times, Serif" color=#6655aa size=4>Tomas, the male protagonist, is a neurosurgeon, philosophically talented and handsome. He believes that having sex without love is possible and that's the way he usually takes. He seizes every single opportunity to seduce every single charming woman he meets if only he can get close to her. Surprisingly few women can refuse him and that encourages his forwardness. It's just like one-night stand. The only woman who maintains a long-term love-affair with him is Sabina, a slut though a brilliant artist. Teresa, the female protagonist, meets Tomas via six unexplainable coincidence and inevitably falls in love with him. What makes her different from the man she loves is that she can not part love from sex, consequently she suffers a lot from his infidelity, the heaviness of life while her lover feels the unbearable lightness of being. Teresa later tried to gain her lightness of being by having sex with a strange man, however she failed. Only after she committed that clandestine adultery, she found with pain Tomas was the special one for her. In her mind, love and sex were the same thing and that is what tormented her but at the same time made her stay with Tomas. Sabina is the other woman who loves Tomas but he's not her only man, for him, she is more like a bosom friend than a lover because she understands him to some extent, moreover they hold the same attitude towards sex. The reason that Sabina is indispensable to Tomas, I think, is he can gain from her satisfaction and comfort both physically and mentally, what's more, he doesn't feel guilty every time he sleeps with another woman. The situation didn't change until he met Teresa, the only woman who touched his heart and made him guilty. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman, Times, Serif" color=#6655aa size=4></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman, Times, Serif" color=#ccffff><FONT color=#6655aa size=4>It took me only two days to finish the book but it takes me more than two years to think about it. Kundera was trying to portray the opposites throughout the story: Life and death, heaviness and lightness...Which is more important or happier between the heaviness and the lightness? He didn't give an answer and just let the readers try to choose. Tomas was the man who spent most of his life on making the hard choice. The novel is in an attempt to illustrate the relationship between coincidence and inevitability, and what makes us need companionship in life so badly. Teresa married Tomas and stayed with him loyally the first time for love, the second time possibly for companionship. She lived with him for so many years knowing his frequent infidelity but she just kept her eyes close. How could she stand it? Is love the only reason? And why she paid him back on his infidelity after so many years? Whatever..It's her that changed Tomas and led him into deep confusion about love and lust, heaviness and lightness; previously he always met her loyalty with his infidelity. Tomas was trying all the time to avoid suffering from the heaviness but he got no place to escape when Teresa appeared. Is it a fortune or tragedy for him? Unknown.. If you read deep enough into this book, you'll repeatedly think, ' it's talking about me'.</FONT> </FONT></DIV></TD></TR></TABLE>

[此贴子已经被Cactus于2006-1-8 14:14:33编辑过]