"With cunning wit, and elegiac sadness, Milan Kundera, the celebrated Czechoslovak emigre writer, expresses the trap the world has become." - New York Times Book Review
"Brilliant . . . A work of high modernist playfulness and deep pathos." - Janet Malcolm, New York Review of Books
"Kundera has raised the novel of ideas to a new level of dreamlike lyricism and emotional intensity." - Jim Miller, Newsweek
"Kundera is a virtuoso . . . A work of the boldest mastery, originality, and richness." - Elizabeth Hardwick, Vanity Fair
"Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond." - People
"Encyclopaedic and epigrammatic, profound and playful, Kundera explores the intersection of the sublime and the ridiculous to give us an important chapter in the moral history of our time." - Judges' citation, 1984 Los Angeles Times Book Prize
"The Unbearable Lightness of Being is both a love story and a novel of ideas. . . . Witty, seductive, serious . . . also full of feeling and enormously experienced in the tricky interplay of sex and politics. . . . One of the finest and most consistently interesting novelists in Europe or America, [Kundera] has a powerful tale to tell." - Washington Post Book World
"A work of large scale and complexity, symphonically arranged. . . Political and philosophical, erotic and spiritual, funny and profound . . . There is no wiser observer now writing of the multifarious relations of men and women. . . . Kundera's intelligence is both speculative and playful. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is his best novel yet." - Wall Street Journal
"I return to the book again and again. Teacher, touchstone, style guide." - Taiye Selasi
"Kundera invents his own style. This novel achieves the most incredible literary fusion, blending myth, love story, musical score and political reflection. And it's this liberty that creates a reading experience that is at once intellectual and sensual. . . . I read it every year and I always find something different. It's an unclassifiable book: part novel, part treatise on philosophy and music, part essay. I don't think a lifetime will be enough to unravel its mystery." - Leïla Slimani
