Milan Kundera's dazzling novel "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting," published here in 1980, was a revelation to xenophobic readers. All preconceived notions of what a "Czech novel" might be were confounded by this extraordinary work, at once political and philosophical, erotic and spiritual, funny and profound. As for the author's intentions, Milan Kundera has commented (in a conversation with Philip Roth) on the peculiar hospitality of the novel form: "Ironic essay, novelistic narrative, autobiographical fragment, historic fact, flight of fantasy: The synthetic power of the novel is capable of combining everything into a unified whole like the voices of polyphonic music."

Now we see that "synthetic power" splendidly at work in Milan Kundera's new novel, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being."… It centers on the connected lives of two couples. Tomas is the most promising young surgeon at his hospital in Prague. He is also an "epic womanizer" and...