Immortality (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Milan Kundera is that rarest of writers, one whose novels keep getting better and better. No small feat in itself, it is one made all the more remarkable given the boldness and brilliance of his first novel, THE JOKE (1967), subsequent efforts on the part of Western reviewers to praise Kundera by reducing his fiction to the level of politics, and most recently the publication of his extraordinary sixth novel THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (1984). Strangely, it may have been the critical and commercial success of Philip Kaufman’s film version of the latter which led Kundera, himself a former professor of film, to write IMMORTALITY as a decidedly unfilmable novel (made paradoxically of perfectly filmable images) and to do this in a continuing effort to discover the essence of the novel as a form, to find out exactly what it is that only a novel can say.

While waiting for a friend, “Milan Kundera,” the image of the author, sees a woman in her sixties turn and wave girlishly to the lifeguard who has just given her a swimming lesson. From that gesture is born a word, Agnes, which in turn engenders a purely mental image of a young woman alone in a half-empty bed, and then of a husband, a daughter, a sister, a mother, and a father (dead five years this very day), whose secretary once used the same gesture made by the woman “actually” seen leaving the pool. It is this gesture, the secretary’s, which Agnes will make her own, fashioning her very being, her immortal being as it were, from it until she sees her sister imitating her, taking not just her gesture but (Agnes believes) her very self.

IMMORTALITY does not develop in terms of Agnes’s character and plot. Drawing on the image of the woman leaving the health club and on bits of news and commentary randomly heard while turning the radio dial, Kundera organizes his text as a series of dizzying variations on a theme in which Agnes plays her part, while Goethe, Hemingway, Bettina von Arnim, and Kundera, along with numerous others, play theirs. Playful, speculative, brilliantly orchestrated, and just as brilliantly translated into English, IMMORTALITY may well prove the one book which not even Kundera will be able to surpass.

Sources for Further Study

America. CLXV, September 28, 1991, p. 198.

Chicago Tribune. May 12, 1991, XIV, p. 1.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. May 19, 1991, p. 3.

The Nation. CCLII, June 10, 1991, p. 770.

The New York Review of Books. XXXVIII, May 30, 1991, p. 3.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVI, April 28, 1991, p. 7.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXVIII, March 29, 1991, p. 77.

Time. CXXXVII, May 13, 1991, p. 75.

The Times Literary Supplement. May 17, 1991, p. 17.

The Washington Post Book World. XXI, May 5, 1991, p. 3.