Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Overview… an artist living in turbulent times. As the Soviets invade Prague during the late ‘60s, up-and-coming contemporary artist Sabina is attempting to deal with her internal conflicts. Her progressive lifestyle has won her the admiration of enthusiastic art collectors. And, her open attitude towards relationships has attracted a harem of lovers, including her good (married) friend Tomáš. Unfortunately for Sabina, a mess of misplaced emotions has complicated their seemingly innocent affair.
Personality… frank and emotionally charged. Sabina is the sort of woman who takes care of herself. Her refusal to view anything as permanent means that she lives for each moment – leading an unapologetically compulsive lifestyle. This makes her intriguing to modern art patrons, who finance her artistic endeavors and provide her a place to stay. Willing to obey her feelings before completely understanding them, Sabina often finds herself torn between two very different choices.
Get to Know her in...
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Tomas is a doctor and a lady-killer in 1960s Czechoslovakia, an apolitical man who is struck with love for the bookish country girl Tereza; his more sophisticated sometime lover Sabina eventually accepts their relationship and the two women form an electric friendship. The three are caught up in the events of the Prague Spring (1968), until the Soviet tanks crush the non-violent rebels; their illusions are shattered and their lives change forever.
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A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover—these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. Controlled by day, Tereza's jealousy awakens by night, transformed into ineffably sad death-dreams, while Tomas, a successful surgeon, alternates loving devotion to the dependent Tereza with the ardent pursuit of other women. Sabina, an independent, free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—of parents, husband, country, love itself—whereas her lover, the intellectual Franz, loses all because of his earnest goodness and fidelity. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel, says the novelist, "the unbearable lightness of being."
