L’immortalità

In what many consider his most ambitious and brilliant novel, Milan Kundera departs from the political themes of his earlier works to explore the very essence of human existence.

The story is triggered by a single, casual gesture: an older woman at a swimming pool waving to her instructor. This fleeting moment inspires the author to create the character of Agnes, a woman living in modern Paris. Her life, and her complex relationship with her sister Laura, forms the modern emotional core of the book.

Parallel to this, Kundera weaves a fascinating historical narrative involving the legendary poet Goethe and his intense, calculated relationship with Bettina von Arnim.

Author: Milan Kundera

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929–2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975 until his death. 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, and the short story collection Laughable Loves—all originally in Czech. His more recent novels, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance, and The Festival of Insignificance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.