Is it appropriate to begin a review of Milan Kundera with a rhetorical question? Are all questions rhetorical? In a 1980 interview with Philip Roth published as an afterward to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera said: "The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything." The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera's fifth novel, is an unquestionable triumph, a Socratic monologue bearing abundant wisdom….

Why does Milan Kundera write like no one else in the world?

Kundera's father was a prominent pianist, and he himself worked for a time as a jazz musician. Two of the principal figures in his first novel, The Joke …, Ludvik and Jaroslav, are a clarinetist and a violinist, respectively. Music furnishes the metaphors by which many Kundera characters live….

Human lives in Kundera are composed like music, and his...