SOURCE: “Intimate Motifs,” in New Statesman, May 25, 1984, pp. 26-8.

In the following review, Glastonbury finds that in The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera “defines his characters as ‘my own unrealized possibilities.’”

This week, Milan Kundera has had as many Western journalists sitting at his feet in Paris as were formerly drawn to the shrine of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa. In consequence, the facts of his career, which began in Brno in 1929, have been well publicised: early membership of the Communist Party; expulsion; reinstatement; acclaim during ‘the Prague Spring’ for his satirical first novel The Joke; dismissal from his post at the National Film School following the Russian invasion; continued residence in Czechoslovakia during the ‘normalization’ period, despite the suppression of his books; finally, in 1975, his acceptance of a professorship at the University of Rennes.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he defines his characters as ‘my own...