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Immortality

Paperback (US Edition) ISBN: 9780060932381
Paperback (UK Edition) ISBN: 9780571144563
Author(s): Milan Kundera Publisher:Harper Collins (US), Faber & Faber (UK)

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

Milan Kundera's sixth novel begins with a casual, elegant gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character – Agnes – in the mind of a writer named Kundera. A novel in seven parts, Immortality alternates the stories of Agnes, her husband Paul, and her sister Laura with a curious historical footnote, the story of the relationship between Goethe and Bettina von Arnim. The novel portrays Goethe and Ernest Hemingway conversing in the afterlife, and the narrator (named Kundera) carrying on an important philosophical discussion with the clear-eyed Professor Avenarius.

Through his characters, Kundera reflects on modem life and Western society and culture, exploring the cult of sentimentality, the difference between the individual self and the individual's public image, the conflict between reality and appearance, the varieties of love and sexual desire, the importance of fame and celebrity, and the all too human longing for immortality. Each of Kundera's characters searches for a way to ensure his survival in the memory of others and, if necessary, at the expense of someone else's immortality.

Like Flaubert's Emma and Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes herself becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From a single gesture springs a character and a novel, themselves gestures of the imagination that both embody and articulate Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to thoroughly explore the great themes of existence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno, the Czech Republic, and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. 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, as well as the short-story collection Laughable Loves — all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.

REVIEW:
"Ingenious witty provocative and formidably intelligent, both a pleasure and a challenge to the reader." ...Jonathon Yardley, Washington Post Book World
 

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel

Paperback (US Edition) ISBN: 9780061148521
Paperback (UK Edition) ISBN: 9780571135394
Author(s): Milan Kundera Publisher:Harper Perennial (US), Faber & Faber (UK)

BOOK DESCRIPTION:
When The Unbearable Lightness of Being was first published in English, it was hailed as "a work of the boldest mastery, originality, and richness" by critic Elizabeth Hardwick and named one of the best books of 1984 by the New York Times Book Review. It went on to win the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and quickly became an international bestseller. Twenty years later, the novel has established itself as a modern classic.

A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover — these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel.

Controlled by day, Tereza's jealousy awakens by night, transformed into ineffably sad death-dreams, while Tomas, a successful surgeon, alternates loving devotion to the dependent Tereza with the ardent pursuit of other women. Sabina, an independent, free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals — of parents, husband, country, love itself — whereas her lover, the intellectual Franz, loses all because of his earnest goodness and fidelity.

In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel, says the novelist, "the unbearable lightness of being" — not only as the consequence of our private acts but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.

This magnificent novel encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, and embraces, it seems, all aspects of human existence. It juxtaposes geographically distant places (Prague, Geneva, Paris, Thailand, the United States, a forlorn Bohemian village); brilliant and playful reflections (on "eternal return", on kitsch, on man and animals — Tomas and Tereza have a beloved doe named Karenin); and a variety of styles (from the farcical to the elegiac) to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world's truly great writers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno, the Czech Republic, and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. 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, as well as the short-story collection Laughable Loves — all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.

REVIEW:
"With cunning wit, and elegiac sadness, Milan Kundera, the celebrated Czechoslovak emigre writer, expresses the trap the world has become." ...New York Times
 

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The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Paperback (US Edition) ISBN: 9780060932145
Paperback (UK Edition) ISBN: 9780571174379
Author(s): Milan Kundera Publisher:Harper Perennial (US), Faber & Faber (UK)

BOOK DESCRIPTION:

Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno, the Czech Republic, and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. 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, as well as the short-story collection Laughable Loves — all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.

REVIEW:
"The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography. It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius." ...New York Times