Immortality (novel)
Author | Milan Kundera |
---|---|
Original title | Nesmrtelnost |
Translator | Peter Kussi |
Country | Czech Republic |
Publication date | 1988 |
Published in English | 1991 |
Pages | 358 |
Immortality (Czech: Nesmrtelnost) is a novel in seven parts, written by Milan Kundera in 1988 in Czech. It was first published in 1990 in French, and then translated into English by Peter Kussi.[1] The story springs from a casual gesture of a woman, seemingly to her swimming instructor. Immortality is the last of a trilogy that includes The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Plot[]
Divided into seven parts, the novel centers on Agnes, her husband Paul, and her sister Laura. Several of the storylines involve real historical figures.
- The Face establishes these characters.
- Immortality describes Goethe's fraught relationship with Bettina, a young woman who aspires to create a place for herself in the pantheon of history by controlling Goethe's legacy after his death.
- Fighting describes Agnes and Laura fight, while focusing on the deteriorating state of Laura's relationship with Bernard Bertrand.
- Homo Sentimentalis describes Goethe's afterlife and postmortem friendship with Ernest Hemingway.
- Chance describes Agnes' death, intersecting with a conversation between Kundera and Professor Avenarius.
- The Dial introduces a new character, Rubens, who had an affair with Agnes years prior to the onset of the main events in the plot.
- The Celebration concludes the novel in the same health club where Kundera first observed the inspirational wave gesture.
The novel is at times narrated by a self-insertion of Kundera. At the start, this narrator sees a woman wave and creates the character of Agnes: "I was strangely moved. And then the word Agnes entered my mind. Agnes. I had never known a woman by that name."
Later, the Kundera character says: "A novel shouldn't be like a bicycle race but a feast of many courses. I am really looking to Part 6. A completely new character will enter the novel. And at the end of that part he will disappear without a trace. He causes nothing and leaves no effects. That is precisely what I like about him. Part 6 will be a novel within a novel, as well as the saddest erotic story I have ever written."[1]
References[]
- ^ a b Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (1991-05-16). "BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Novel Re-examined In a Novel by Kundera". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-09-24.
- Novels by Milan Kundera
- 1988 novels
- 20th-century Czech novels
- Cultural depictions of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe