Immortality

by Milan Kundera

• ISBN13: 9780060974480
• ISBN10: 0060974486
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1992-05-06
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose; to explore thoroughly the great, themes of existence.

Author Biography

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, for more than twenty years. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves--all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness and Identity, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.

Table of Contents

PART ONE The face

PART TWO Immortality

PART THREE Fighting

The sisters

Dark glasses

The body

Addition and subtraction

Older woman, younger man The Eleventh Commandment

Imagology The brilliant ally of his own gravediggers A complete ass

The cat The gesture of protest against a violation of human rights To be absolutely modern

To be a victim of one's fame Fighting

Professor Avenarius

The body The gesture of longing for immortality

Ambiguity The clairvoyant

Suicide

Dark glasses

PART FOUR Homo sentimentalis

PART FIVE Chance

PART SIX The dial

PART SEVEN The celebration