9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Politics as French Farce, October 6, 2000
By A Customer
Milan Kundera is one of the writers and intellectuals closely affiliated with Alexander Dubcek's, Prague Spring, that failed attempt to create a safe haven for "socialism with a human face." Soviet tanks ended The Prague Spring before it could really begin in 1968.
Kundera, who was unrepentant, suffered exclusion from the writer's union, loss of his teaching post at the Prague Film School, denial of a passport and the banning of his plays--and that was just the beginning.
Labeled a pariah, Kundera refused to practice Issac Babel's "aesthetics of silence." He simply went right on writing, earning a worldwide reputation that eventually rewarded him with the 1973 Prix Medicis Etranger for his hilariously funny novel, Life is Elsewhere. Kundera, still better known in Europe than in the United States, is a highly accomplished, polished and sophisticated writer.
In The Farewell Party, we have a contemporary Czech novel washed in the atmosphere of a French or Viennese turn-of-the-century farce. At a health spa and fertility clinic, only a short, four-hour drive from an unnamed European capital, barren but hopeless ladies splash in the mineral waters, hoping against hope for the miracle that will infuse them with new life. Infusion does arrive, in the form of the Mad Scientist, Dr. Skreta, and the book takes on the character of mindless erotic frolic on a gaudily bedecked stage.
The characters are better described as caricatures. There is saucy Nurse Ruzena, newly pregnant, the result of "two fateful hours," there is Kamila, the betrayed wife and Klima, her philandering husband, who just might be the father of Nurse Ruzena's baby-to-be. The absurd accelerates to near-pandemonium as these character-cliches spin and twirl, dazzling us with their antics. The atmosphere alters, however, when a new character enters the scene. This is Jakub, a rehabilitated victim of a Stalinish purge, newly-returned from the dead.
Sexual antics, burlesque, and elegant, high comedy comprise the tone of The Farewell Party and the narrative, as always, weaves its way into graceful and inevitable patterns. But as anyone who has read Kundera knows, darker elements always manage to work their way into what appears, at first glance, to be nothing more than high comedy and farce.
Political overtones begin to gather like darkening shadows, first enclosing Ruzena and Jakub who engage in a seemingly ridiculous argument over a rambling bulldog and end up wanting to kill each other.
Kundera, himself, seems amused at all of this, and he takes it in stride, as if nothing untoward has happened. Things do, however, happen...
Kundera, who wrote The Farewell Party while still living in post-Dubcek Czechoslovakia, obviously decided not to submit to any possible penalties and, instead, remained faithful to himself and his art. The result is a political novel from one of this century's most gifted writers in a time and place in which political novels were most vehemently forbidden.
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