Word: comically
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...Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The resulting oppression halted the liberal reforms that blossomed during the famous Prague Spring of 1968 and eventually drove a number of intellectuals and artists, including Kundera, from their native country. Songs of exile are sad, by definition. Yet Kundera's added a comic vision capable of seeing both oppressors and oppressed locked in battle against a common enemy, the bizarre senselessness of a world in which all human choices lead to debacles...
...boiled hero, based on the young Jean Gabin, reappears 20 years later as the aging Gabin's Inspector Maigret. There is plenty of verve here but little charm; the relentless closeups favored by Director Ettore Scola (A Special Day, La Nuit de Varennes) turn every character into a comic-pathetic gargoyle. It is left to the nostalgic sound track to evoke the emotions of a nation as the Na zis stormed in and the Americans took over and the Revolution failed . . . and the band played...
EXPERIENCE IS A BURDEN because, seen from the lights of an unassuming intellect, it can be described and apprehended but not valued or shared; experience is light, even comic, but it no longer forms a bond between people. In narrating Tereza's life and in discussing the unsatisfactory nature of love, Kundera is at his very best; he brings the problem of lightness of being home in concrete and ironic terms...
...condition of love, indeed, that the lightness of experience becomes most comic and most acute; Kundera's meditation on the problems of love are very fine. Sabina, looking at Franz's physically powerful frame, grows angry at Franz's refusal to use his strength outwardly in directing others' lives. He is too weak, she thinks, at the same time knowing that a strong man would be at least as offensive; she decides, in a terrible access of honesty, that it is love itself she cannot stomach. A more unsettling predicament is the failure even of dedicated lovers to achieve real...
...amusing anachronism. At the State Department, in the early hours of the crisis, most of the staff shared the amusement of the press and public over what was perceived as a Gilbert and Sullivan battle over a sheep pasture between a choleric old John Bull and a comic dictator in a gaudy uniform. Among the White House staff, there was little sense of urgency...