Tereza

Juliette Binoche as Tereza

Milan Kundera’s book The Unbearable Lightness of Being [1984] portrays Tereza as the weight which comes to his protagonist Tomas as an ‘It must be.’ Tomas prefers lightness, but “the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.”

Tereza meets Tomas when he comes to the bar where she is working. He sits alone with a book and asks for a cognac. Beethoven is playing on the radio. Tereza, who went to work at 15 to help her family, sees in Tomas a representative of what she has always longed for: a higher culture. “Lives are composed like music, guided by musical motifs,” Kundera tells us. “Without realizing it, an individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.” Tereza goes to Prague and knocks at Tomas’ door. He lets her in, feeling that she is a baby in a bullrush basket, sent down the river to meet him.

This meeting takes place in the mid-1960’s. Tereza moves in with Tomas. His friend Sabine finds Tereza a job on a magazine. Seeing promise in her, Sabine shows her photographs, what is important about each. Tereza takes up the camera and becomes a staff photographer. When the Russians move tanks in to Prague in 1968, repressing Czechoslovakia, Tereza roams the streets, photographing what is happening and handing her film to foreigners to take out of the country.

Sabine moves to Switzerland, and Tomas and Tereza soon follow. Tomas is a surgeon in a hospital. He is happy and feels free and much lighter. But being in a foreign country is like walking a tightrope. Tereza cannot handle the vertigo. She goes back to Prague, feeling weak. Tomas follows her, giving up his passport. Neither of them can leave Czechoslovakia again.

In Prague, both Tomas and Tereza feel the crushing weight of living under communist ideology. Tereza works as a waitress because she cannot be forgiven for giving her film to foreigners. Tomas is asked to retract an article he once wrote, but he will not. He is discharged from his job as a surgeon and takes up window washing. This job feels like a vacation, and he gives in to his adulterous delight in the bodies of women he meets. It makes Tereza miserable. She too has an adventure which seems to be a set up to get her to inform on her customers. Tereza and Tomas hardly see each other except in sleep.

Two years after leaving the hospital, Tomas is physically tired. “Prague has grown so ugly lately,” he tells Tereza. They talk of moving and find work on a communal farm in the country. Tereza minds the heifers, which are turned out each day to pasture, with the help of her dog Karenin. Tomas drives the pickup which takes workers out to the fields. The police stop pestering them, but they are unusual. Other communal farm workers find it is just a job and wish to move to the city. Instead of going dancing, at night they watch television in their homes. Tereza takes comfort among the animals, however. Animals love voluntarily.

When Karenin dies, Tomas and Tereza bury him between the crooked apple trees. Left to her thoughts, Tereza feels responsible for Tomas. It is her fault he moved back from Switzerland. She has used her weakness against him. She is afraid he is bored with her. But, one day she puts on a pretty dress and they go to the next town to dance. “Haven’t you noticed that I’m happy here?” Tomas asks her. Their death in an automobile accident is reported to Sabine by Tomas’ estranged son.

Kundera’s philosophical novel gives him a chance to present his thoughts on many subjects, including a diatribe against kitsch. Kitsch fills Sabine with horror. But Kundera feels it may be inescapable. “The novel is not the author’s confession. It is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.”

Though I loved the movie made of this novel by Philip Kaufman in 1988, Kundera repudiated it. I suspect that the movie did not portray the heaviness of the Russian occupation to the extent we see it in the novel. Tereza remains a finely wrought icon and the contrast Kundera sets up between her character and that of Sabine an interesting question.