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.