The writer Milan Kundera stated in one of the pages of his book that this is entirely a novel in
variations mode.This is
not for the first time when the Czech novelist is working straightly but the discovery of his intentions seems to make us think what happened to him, usualya great master of the irony. His permanent obssessive themes - the laugh and the
forgetting, here, together with the erotic aspects, the vilany or the shame from here and from nowhere - needed certainly the liberty confered by a structure with minimum restrictions such the
variations form. But above these variations stands the tender and in the same time ironical sight which, from his French exile, Kundera is throwing now on the world, the living place and the former world where the people seem to be simple variations of few basical impulses, with tiny complications to cross. Their answer to this are almost stereotypical and they are in fact humans living a blocked life; their huge appetite for compromise is drawing a world for which even the paradise projection is infested.