Zappa Times

“So many books so little time...” Inspired by Frank Zappa, Zappa Times writes about literature, nature, food, and economics.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Middle Class

The title of this article could have easily been "Can you paint the picture of happiness for me, Wellbutrin?" (For those who don't know yet: "Wellbutrin" is a drug used to treat certain symptoms of depression.) But I didn't want to rely on Nazım Hikmet again, and Milan Kundera didn't seem like a bad alternative this week. I was still at university when The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) came to the bookstores in Turkey. I remember that I found the book too "bourgeois" and refused to read it because I was very leftist at the time. When I read it later, I was quite impressed. Those years, of course, I was as surprised as everyone else. The "iron curtain" was coming down piece by piece in Czechoslovakia and Poland. So much so that when the Soviet Union, accompanied by the concepts of Glastnost and Perestroika, which Gorbachev taught the whole world, flipped the switch in 1989, not only the iron curtain but also an era in the world was coming down. In those years, Francis Fukuyama, with his book The End of History and the Last Man, heralded that Western liberal democracy had become the political norm all over the world. 

Read more

Subscribe