Immortality
Milan Kundera's Immortality, published in 1990, is the Czech master's most playful late period meditation on what it means to be remembered. The novel opens with a scene at a Paris swimming pool, where a sixty something woman waves at her swimming instructor in a gesture so beautiful that the narrator, a novelist named Milan Kundera, decides to invent a character around it. He names her Agnes and weaves her, her sister Laura, and her husband Paul through a series of philosophical digressions on Goethe, Hemingway, the inventor of the seat belt, and the difference between the small immortality of being remembered by one's children and the great immortality of having one's image broken loose in history. Along the way Kundera examines image culture, the scandal economy of late twentieth century media, and the ways in which we all secretly cast ourselves as the protagonists of our own posthumous biographies. The book is essayistic, recursive, and gently wicked, the work of a writer aware that mortality is the only honest critic.
Themes & atmosphere
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What you might want to know about Immortality
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A gesture from a stranger by a swimming pool sets off a Kundera novel that braids modern Paris life with Goethe and his secretary, then loops back to ask what part of a person actually outlasts them.
Immortality was written by Milan Kundera, originally published in French in 1990. It is one of his major novels alongside The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Joke.
Immortality blends multiple narrative threads with philosophical essays on Goethe, Hemingway, and modern celebrity. It is more demanding than The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Most readers either love or struggle with its meta-narrative structure.
Immortality is 400 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Immortality takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
Immortality is a standalone novel by Milan Kundera, not part of a series.
Immortality is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.