their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. people in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. this happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. they are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. they are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. the second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes.
the first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. we can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under.
The fresh descriptions and masterful employment of several narrators testify to Kundera's power as a novelist, unmistakable even in this early work.“We all need someone to look at us. Years later, after he has resumed his studies and become a successful scientist, his lingering anger at the man who engineered his expulsion culminates in an act of destructive sexual revenge that serves only to show Ludvik he has never really understood any woman and is indeed the butt of one of history's many cruel jokes.
He is expelled from the Communist Party, forced to leave the university and join a special army unit with other enemies of the state. Looking back on the tense, McCarthy-like atmosphere of the late 1940s, it chronicles the disastrous results of Ludvik's prankish postcard to a girlfriend criticizing the Czech communist regime. In this new English-language version of Kundera's classic first novel, completely revised by the author to incorporate the most accurate portions of two previous translations plus his own corrections, the narrator Ludvik wonders, "What if History plays jokes?" This politically charged question, coupled with Ludvik's fate as an unintentional dissident, struck a chord in Czech readers the novel's 1967 publication was a key literary event of the Prague Spring. A great novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried, in a completely revised translation that is nothing less than the restoration of a classic. The authoritative version of the brilliant first novel by the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
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