Immortality

Milan Kundera is one of the most popular writers of our time, and each of his new works adds to the series of bestsellers in intellectual prose. «Immortality», his most thought-out and most mysterious novel, is the last one he wrote in Czech, captivating the reader with its exquisite style, complex range of feelings and thoughts, and subtle understanding. Here, Goethe converses with Hemingway; Bettina von Arnim talks about her unearthly feeling for the great German; a woman named Agnès, who has lived in a happy marriage for twenty years, realizes that after death she would like to remain alone; an elderly lady in a pool waves flirtatiously at the swimming instructor like a beautiful young woman — and through all this, the author observes through time and space. Just as Flaubert's novel is born from the character of Emma Bovary, Kundera's «Immortality» grows out of the image of Agnès, for immortality is indeed the main and inseparable property of the human soul.