The Unbearable Lightness of Being-22

This book was a bit too confusing for me to extract the psychological ideas from it, the main character Thomas was said to have died at three or four points in the book. Tereza, the woman who loved Thomas and was very jealous of his many mistresses was said to have left him about a third of the way through the book, but then the rest of the book is filled with them being together. I don't remember a scene where they were reunited though.

The constant foreign words that were defined once and then assumed that they were understood for the next few hundred pages didn't help. Due to the Christmas craze of the past few weeks it took a long time to finish this book, so towards the end these foreign words were hard to cope with since I had forgotten their meanings.

With all of this I'm afraid this blog post will have to be the worst of the bunch, I really don't have anything to put in it.

The things I did gather are rather simple and uninteresting. I can only assume the author is very anti-communist, or at least anti-Stalinist. The constant events describing how communism oppressed people are representative of that. however being anti-communist and anti-Stalin are different things. Stalin was a dictator who also happened to be a communist. So the author could be against the dictatorship but not against the ideals of communism.

The author also illustrates the difference between making love and feeling love. Thomas loved Teresa, but constantly pursued other women for his baser urges. For some reason he was unable to see why this was wrong, I didn't quite understand his viewpoint though, which is probably a good thing for any future girlfriends or wives I may have in the future.

Another thing that I remember is that at one point the Author speculated a bit about how God and our waste products were related. We are disgusted by our waste products, but since we are made in God's image then he must defecate just as we do. If he does not produce the things that we find disgusting than we are not like him and the bible is wrong. If he does defecate then we must either consider our waste as not disgusting or accept that God is not a perfect being. Apparently the writers of the bible edited the text to avoid the problem.

That's just about all the philosophy I remember from the book, and even that is rather poorly remembered. So I'm going to cut my losses here and move on to the next book, hopefully it will turn out better than this one.