Immortality

This was the first Kundera I read, as a result of a friends recomendation, and I was extremely immpressed.Mr Kundera creates a novel of that rare species here: essentially I am unable to classify it, yet it made me think more deeply than usual and consider the entire world in an entirely different light when I managed to drag myself away from its pages.The novel opens with Kundera himself witnessing an old woman making a gesture which he believes belies her age: quickly Kundera considers the fact that gestures themselves are immortal: many people have lived throughout history but they have utilized relatively few gestures.Surprisingly, Kundera weaves an entire character out of this simple gesture, invents friends, relatives, thoughts and feelings for her, and eventually manages to intertwine her life with his own, projecting himself into his own novel, although so subtely do the two stories interlock that when we suddenly realise what has occured slow and joyful understanding blossoms upon our faces.Along the way, Kundera uses the tale of the great German poet Goethe and the woman Bettina Von Arnim as a kind of historical paradigm for his modern tragedy, paints us a brief but fantastical picture of Hemingway and Goethe conversing beyond this worlds boundaries and, of course, muses upon the nature of Immortality, as well as tackling serious world issues with characteristic Kundera informality.Kundera is witty and profound: many of the social and cultural observations included in this book made me laugh out loud. His discourse on such diverse subjects as music, world government, sex and the paths gossip take are so wonderfully woven into the primary story they seem to creep into your brain and only surface later, at which point one can nod admiringly at Kundera's wisdom.Undoubtedly, a book I would not heitate to recommend, this novel should be read carefully and lovingly by eveyone.Rabidly intelligent, astonishingly well written, ambitious, experimental and indispensable to the thoughtful reader.

These days, it's hard to come across a book which is really innovative, since all sorts of experiments have been conducted in literature. This is one original work. It is a beautiful novel that the reader writes along with the author. It's kind of "interactive", just like some by Machado de Assis and Calvino, extremely different authors. Starting from the gesture of a mature woman, Kundera invents fictional characters who interact with other characters, supposedly real, as well as with the author himself. These characters are the excuse Kundera uses to conduct an acute reflection on our age and, in particular, on our cult of technology and image. Besides Agnes (the spirit) and Laura (the body), other memorable characters are Rubens, Agnes's ocasional lover who is sad and melancholic, and Prof. Avenarius, for whom the world is only an object for diversion. This novel transforms all aspects of the modern world into metaphysical issues, and its form is polyphonic: the story is alternated with that of Goethe and Bettina Brentano, which serves to explain and reinforce some reflections by Kundera. There's also a digression about the emergence of "homo sentimentalis" in Europe, as well as a witty dialogue between the spirits of Goethe and Hemingway (interesting, isn't it?). The novel is extremely inspiring, it's beautiful in spite of some paternal and lecturizing passages.

If you like straightforward books with straightforward plots, straightforward characters and straightforward beginnings, storylines and conclusions, this book may not for you. The novel takes place in the present, in the past, in the afterlife & in the surreal world of Kundera's imagination. The work has several different seemingly separate stories that Kundera somehow weaves into a coherent whole. We meet people that we are led to believe actually exist who talk with the author during "intermissions" of the novel. Later, we learn that Kundera was discussing topics with the characters in his novel.The book has sundry marvelous sections which brood over just about every intellectual topic associated with immortality. We see an eloborate (although fictionalized) glimpse of Goethe's historical meeting with Napoleon. We get an impression of how many great artists look upon their craft as mementos of their immortality. We even get an answer to the $60,000 question: WHAT would happen if Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Earnest Hemingway met up in the afterlife? (Wow! What a thought!)As I mentioned earlier, this book does not have the standard structure of most other novels. That said, however, it was quite enjoyable to read. It did not go off the deep end of Faulkneresque stream-of-consciousness psycho-babble. An excellent and entertaining postmodern effort.

I flew through this book, enchanted. It's scintillating gravity drags you in, swirls you around, and leaves you hovering, like a moon about a planet. Kundera's genius is that he writes novels structured more like symphonies or string quartets than novels. He dispenses with the direct approach to action, allows characters and themes to intermingle in sonata-like freedom and splendor. His sections function like orchestral movements; they differ completely, often feeding on new thematic material; each can function seperately, yet all compliment the whole. Witness how Agnes' story is studied in some depth. We long for more, but Kundera drags in Gothe, Bettina and Hemmingway; how magical. We are in suspense, waiting to find out about Agnes. Then, back to Agnes and her sister... But what about Gothe? What's the trial both Hemmingway and he are facing in the afterworld? Then there's the stories of the girl who's dead inside because the world won't respond to her, and Ruben's, dead to life in the now, exiled to the Land Beyond Love. And, just where do Avenarius and Ruth fit into this? Or Kundera, the author, who shows up in an Eischerian recursiveness. Strangely, all these stories fit together, and drive the novel; the compulsion to follow these characters draws us further in. This is storytelling at its artful best. Another thing truly remarkable about Kundera is his subtle use of ideas; his is a novelistic universe where ideas, stated or mused about in the first person (Yes... you know its Kundera, not a character, thinking these thoughts) become themes in a fugue that runs paralell to, though distinct from, the action. The voices in this fugue are quite charming, insightful as Vonnegut's, yet never clumsy as, say, Robbins' can get; in fact, these idea-themes raise more questions than they answer. Love is examined; from the passionate, almost hysterical loves of Bettina and Ruth, to the detatched, though honest love of Agnes, to the empty, loveless physical eroticism of Reubens that fails to resonate because he gives nothing of himself to his lovers, and takes none of them in. Another idea-theme is image versus substance. Modern culture is obsessed with image, not substance. Where is the boundry between real and imagined? This leads to an examination of immortality; how we live on only through those we touch, yet, of course, their images of us are not us. What, if anything, lays beyond? Heavy stuff with a light touch. Kundera succeeds where a lot of structural modernists fail because he seems intoxicated with life, love, people and their foibles, and thus draws engagingly real characters, not the shadowy half-things of Pynchon, or Joyce's labrynthine characters, in extremely complex structures... In this case, a structure arguably more complex that "Ulysses" or "Gravity's Rainbow". Yet I don't want to scare readers off. Those are books I read like medicine; they taste bad, but someone told me its good for me. "Immortality", I'll re-read because I

I read this first as an excerpt in the New Yorker before it was published in the states and I didn't read it so much as devour it. The first few chapters are dazzling, but they set a pace that is difficult for the rest of the book to keep up with. There are some places where I felt like I was trying to sprint waist-high in mud - don't get me wrong, I love Goethe, but these passages relating to him did not compel me with the magic of the first sections or the last. I have read the book three times since then and find more to love about it, argue with and be intrigued with each time. Erudite and compelling, a man who knows womens' minds perhaps too well, I love this writer.