Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Overview… living in Prague just before the Soviet invasion. Tomáš is a successful surgeon who enjoys life on the edges of the public eye. Rubbing elbows with academic and political elites, he seems like an unshakable fixture in the upper crust. Confident and aware of his allure, Tomáš has had multiple affairs despite being married. He never expected consequences to his actions – until political unrest destabilizes his life in multiple ways.
Personality… cold and pensive. Tomáš is able to easily separate his feelings from his actions. This trait is one reason he can act in morally questionable ways, like his multiple affairs. Wracked by spurs of depression and constant doubts about the universe, Tomáš searches for meaning in relationships and pays particular attention to the small details of life.
Get to Know him 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."
