"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (1984) by Milan Kundera

Are there any books that most of your friends sing endless praises on, and you pick it up, read it cover to cover without prejudice or expectations, then think it is a massive waste of time? Since one can easily find lots of positive comments elsewhere, at the risk of offending my friends, I shall offer an alternative perspective here. Nobody picks up a fiction and expects to learn existential philosophy academically. This is not a textbook, but when a work starts with an upfront discourse on Nietzsche, the myth of Sisyphus and the notion of "Being", the reader is led to take this foreword as the basis against which the subsequent trajectory is set. The brevity of the discussion comes across as superficial and inevitably invites disagreement. That is not a problem in itself as the thoughtful reader should be capable of distilling substance regardless of position, but as the book progresses it turns into a convoluted, contrived and over-stretched allegory of very little substance. "Lightness" and "weight" are questionable and unreliable metaphorical quantities to measure life with anyway, and linking lightness and weight in the metaphysical sense to the physical sense in sexuality is an unacceptably juvenile and wild extrapolation. The text is particularly pompous and obnoxious when the author redefines perspectives on the readers' behalf in a series of "Words Misunderstood" and reevaluates the story of rampant adultery by lecturing, with very shallow philosophical underpinnings, the readers in Part Six. The entire reading experience is an unbearable weight of an authoritative tone imposing unbalanced opinions on the reader, which is ironic given the political context of the work. The saving grace is Part Seven where the notion of "Being" is reexamined by considering the life and euthanasia of a dog, which sheds more light on the discussion than the rest of the book (does a dog even concern itself with lightness and weight? By Cartesian philosophy, does it even qualify as a "Being"?) There must be a reason why this book generated cult following, but neither my philosophy, preference nor personality align with any part of this book.