SOURCE: “Leap into the Void,” in Newsweek, April 30, 1984, p. 77.

In the following review, Miller asserts that The Unbearable Lightness of Being “is clearly meant to be the capstone of Kundera's career to date.”

With each new book, Milan Kundera, the virtuoso Czech novelist exiled in Paris, has enlarged and embellished his bleak vision of man's fate. Like a dour toy designer lavishing his attention on an intricately mirrored kaleidoscope, he has devised delightful new forms and fragments that expand the play of light and darkness. After the somber realism of The Joke (1969) and the rococo tragicomedy of The Farewell Party (1976), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980) came as a revelation—a scintillating collage comprised of parables, autobiographical scraps and blunt scenes of sexual conquest and submission. It had the air of a sublime improvisation—impromptu, serendipitous, inspired.

Kundera's new book evokes a weightier musical analogy: Beethoven's last string...