I Read a Book! The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

I've been reading this wonderful book The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. I finished it on the subway this afternoon, and I feel like I could go back and read it from cover to cover. Partly because I feel like maybe I wasn't smart enough to get everything the first go-round. I was expecting a bit of a love story. A younger girl with an older man, but not too Lolita-esque. I can't say the plot was necessarily compelling. But by the time I was half way through I was so taken by the characters and their rich emotional lives--oscillating from seeming overwrought to being completely relatable--that I couldn't stop and wanted to see what new insights into the human condition the next page would bring up.

Anyway, I love the book. That is why I am sort of devastated I just spilled strawberry milk all over it. I am slowly peeling the sticky pages apart in order to preserve this copy.


The book was a lot about human relationships and misunderstandings and the unending complexity of love and fidelity and relating to another human being (against the backdrop of a Russian-occupied Czechoslovakia).

But it was also about a dog. A dog named Karenin (after Anna's husband in Anna Karenina).

Karenin is one of the most beautiful characters in the book. Tomas gets him to keep Tereza early in the novel.

Reading about Karenin, I was sappily reminded of how important my dogs were to me. I found this passage really beautiful, and sort of a small encapsulation of so much of the book as the relationship between Tereza and her dog is assessed and represented as a pure, undefilable sort of coexistence.

It is a completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not ever ask him to lover her back. Nor had she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couples; Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, to test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand free and asking for nothing but his company.

Now that I am overwhelmed with affection for dogs. Enjoy this small collection of pictures of my two favorite canines in the history of creation: