Quick overview of the rest of the book:
(Note: the book goes back in forth in time to when Tomas and Tereza are alive, and when they are dead)
Sabina moves to America and lives with an old couple who become like the parents she always wanted and doted on her. But she was unhappy because she kept thinking about what would happen after they died and she would be all alone with nothing once again.
Franz loves the girl he is with, but he still thinks about Sabina and wants to honor her memory by going to her home country. There he realizes he misunderstood Sabina and they never really belonged together. He realizes how much he loves the girl back at home and that he is happy without Sabina. But he is killed in Cambodia and never returns to he girl he loves.
Tomas had decided to give up his mistresses for Tereza, but he lost his job as a surgeon and became a window washer, which drove him to encompass the lightness of no job and he began "womanizing", as the book calls it, again to fully bear a total lightness of being. Tereza convinces him to move to the country with her and he gives up all his affairs and gives into his love for her completely. Tereza feels terrible for not being strong enough to put up with Tomas' mistresses and thinks he is unhappy or not as happy as he could be as a surgeon with all the other women. Tereza feels this imagined unhappiness is her fault, but Tomas explains to her that he is happy and loves her. Terza stops worrying and Tomas and her are finally happy together.
For the second update, I am going to pick a quote from the book that I think sort of shows what the book was trying to get at.
"So Beethoven turned a frivolous inspiration into a serious quartet, a joke into metaphysical truth. It is an interesting tale of light going to heavy, or as Parmenides would have said it, positive going to negative. Yet oddly enough, the transformation fails to surprise us. We would have been shocked, on the other hand, if Beethoven had transformed the seriousness of his quartet into the trifling of a four-voice canon about Dembscher's purse. Had he done so, however, he would have been in the spirit of Parmenides and made heavy go to light, that is, negative to positive! First (as an unfinished sketch) would have come to the great metaphysical truth and last (as a finished masterpiece) - the most frivolous of jokes! But we no longer know how to think as Parmenides thought."
I think that what made everyone in the book happy eventually was taking the negative (the weight) and making it positive (light). I think the characters needed to not take everything so seriously. So Franz finally took his love for Sabina, and realized it wasn't right. He stopped taking their affair so seriously; he took a step back and then looked at it and he saw that it wasn't so serious. And Sabina, she could have been happy if instead of dreading what was to come, she had just enjoyed what was. If she had just enjoyed the fact that the old couple she was living with doted on her a loved her, she would have found the lightness she needed to be happy, the positive side of things. And Tomas and Tereza forgot about all the other things (weights) in their lives and just loved each other. They had aways loved each other, but they kept all the negative things with the, in their way; Tomas' mistresses, Tereza's guilt, etc.
So I think that there is an unbearable lightness of being, where you hold nothing dear to you and nothing really matters to you, so life is pointless, but there is also a lightness where you only look or hold onto the positives of your life and you just live, forgetting about and letting go of the negatives (aka, weights). I think that is what the book was trying to say and that quote from the book really portrays it well I think.
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