SOURCE: “Weighting for Kundera,” in Commonweal, May 18, 1984, pp. 297-300.

In the following review, DePietro discusses the portrayal of totalitarianism in contemporary world literature and Kundera's political and philosophical concerns in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Totalitarianism, for all the efforts of political theorists to define it, remains as slippery a term as ever, a concept that usually explains either too much or too little. The testimony of literature on this topic, however, the evidence submitted by a wealth of poets and novelists—from Czeslaw Milosz to Garcia Marquez to J. M. Coetzee and Milan Kundera—brings us back to the issues which occasioned the political science inquiry in the first place. What astonishes even the casual reader of recent world literature is this: writers from countries as unlike as Poland, Colombia, South Africa, and Czechoslovakia all perceive at the core of contemporary experience (and not just in countries...