Immortality

Immortality is the last novel Milan Kundera wrote in Czech, first published in France in 1990 under the French title L'Immortalité. Set in Paris and Switzerland, the novel adopts a polyphonic structure akin to a symphony, with seven chapters advancing three contrapuntal narrative lines in alternation: one follows the daily life and spiritual detachment of Agnès, a middle-aged woman living in Paris whose homeland is Switzerland, who amid the entanglements of family, her mother, and her sister Laura conceives the desire to leave home and be alone; one recounts the elderly Goethe's association with the young Bettina von Arnim and how that association was later rewritten and romanticized by posterity; the third depicts the dissolute life of a man nicknamed "Rubens." Real historical figures and fictional characters meet and converse in the text, even arguing directly with the narrator himself, and the novel also brings Hemingway and Goethe together in the beyond, where they discuss the fate of their posthumous "image." In the book Kundera distinguishes "small immortality" from "great immortality": the former is leaving a memory in the minds of those who know you, the latter in the minds of those who never knew you. Around this proposition the novel unfolds layer upon layer of speculation on image, romanticism, love, youth, chance and necessity, the self and existence, in a language light yet sharply edged. This Chinese edition is translated jointly by Wang Zhensun and Zheng Kelu.