For his 3rd pick...
Ronald Pagan of The Cart-Driven Mountebanks selects:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera
In the European Literature category.
Kundera's hollowing story of love and infidelity marks a masterful moment of Cold War literature.
The story recounts the life of a serial womanizer, his partner and their shared love and anguish. I don't really know how to describe this book. It moved me deeply.
It questions the associations and bonds between individuals through marriage and between individuals and their country through authoritarianism. Ultimately, both bonds are meaningless as the individual themselves must forge their own path to happiness and enlightenment. It is a post-existential book where the rooted problems of the characters are real and pressing but where they all have the choice to accept their own paranoia or press through the pain to find their own salvation.
Kundera's prose, especially his moments inside Teresa's thoughts are thundering. Wonderful book.