Customer Reviews

Farewell Waltz: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is the most readable of Kundera's works, and is handled differently form his other novels. The contrast with "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is striking; he sticks to the plotline and avoids the philosophical.

Kundera's standard formula is to put the character in a situation that is profound and offers some insight, then step back as narrator and explain to the reader exactly why this situation is profound and what is the insight.

This is not a criticism. Kundera is clearly a master and Unbearable Lightness is one of my favorite novels. It is simply that "the Farewell Waltz" is different; those expecting more standard Kundera fare might be disappointed. I myself was delighted.

The characters were diverse, irreverent, and interesting. Despite the farcical nature of the novel they remain believable. This is a novel that one can read and enjoy for the story, the character mix, the black humor, and the occasional political musings. Kundera does not beat the reader over the head with the philosophical points; these are left for you to discover. A wonderful book.

For satire so poignant and caustic that the reader cannot help but to examine his or her own life through the eyes of the narrator, Farewell Waltz is an excellent example of why Mr. Kundera soon will win the Nobel Prize for Literature. --RMJ Duke University School of Law

This book is absolutely amazing. True, it is not like the Unbearable Lightness of Being or Immortality, in which Kundera takes the philosophical aspects of every situtation and magnifies it to the "meaning of life" (how's that for a cliche phrase?) This novel appears to be a lot lighter (no pun intended). It doesn't chew through every philosophical theory, but implies it with the characters' absurd and almost silly actions, which they take so seriously that one cannot help but smile. Believe it or not subtelty is key here as far as complex ideas go, even amidst all the plot twists. The reviewer who thought this novel not as contemplative or polished as Kundera's other and more famous works, certainly missed the point of it. This novel is probably one of Kundera's most structured and polished. Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality tend to ramble (not that the ramble isn't absolutely wonderful!) and have a bit of the old author-commentary-through-narrative-overkill. The Farewell Waltz is simply perfect! In fact I think that this novel better evoke, without ever spelling it out, the whole mood, attitude, and meaning (or lack there of) of the state he likes to call "the unbearable lightness of being". Oh, and some great politics and sex too. Any faithful Kundera fan will certainly enjoy!

All Kundera's books have a certain sadness in themselves, so typical for every Central European person, especially Slavic. This one is, however, also funny, but not in a way that you'll burst out laughing and roll down on the floor, but in a way that you will feel that special "sting" to your mind which will feel good and bitter at the same time. Look out for the word of a Czech-American "saint" and for the actions the spa fertility doctor undertakes and that is just enough. No other contemporary European author can be so philosophical and funny at the same time as Kundera. I rate this book 10 out of 10, for it is my favourite.

On the surface this novel couldt be regarded as mystery, but Kundera isn't a crime-writer at all. He keeps the reader always on track what's going on. Nevertheless the story becomes more and more suspenseful regarding the question wether there'll be at the end a victim or not. But that I don't reveal here. As ever I was very impressed by Kunderas mastership in drawing the characters. Every figure comes forward with all of it's strenghts and weakenings, with all of it's rarity and commonness. Nobody get's a prefered position by the author. Even nobody seems to bear the blame, blame appears more as dereliction. In a very subtile manner Kundera clarifies the reason why under communist dictatorships humanity failes more often than elsewhere.

Summary:
"[For] Kundera, the individual is the smallest cell of society, the object, not the subject of history." - Elisabeth Pochoda
In a small spa town, seven characters searching for happiness find themselves intertwined in a waltz orchestrated by Milan Kundera. In five days you will be introduced to, and discover, the secrets and desires of a pretty nurse (Ruzena), a suspicious boyfriend, a gynecologist, a rich American, a famous trumpeter and his obsessively jealous wife and a former political prisoner about to leave the country. How far will the characters go to fulfill their will? Human morality, responsibility, and quest for stability are held under scrutiny and explored in this wonderfully written book.

Thoughts:
Full of wit, charm, sudden revelations and memorable quotes, this book is a true enchantment to read, bringing you into the lives of all these characters. You'll wonder when and where their interaction will occur and once you discover it, you won't be able to stop reading on to wonder where the characters will go next. A wonderful read that will certainly become a favorite.

Memorable quotes (as I translated from the French):
"Aesthetic racism is almost always a mark of inexperience. [...] When God invited humanity to love and to reproduce, doctor, he was thinking of the ugly just as much as the handsome. I am thus convinced that aesthetic criticism comes not from God, but from the Devil. In heaven, no one distinguishes between ugliness and beauty."

"I say that maternity is a curse and I refuse to contribute in it."

"I know only one thing; that I could never say with total conviction that man is a wonderful being and I want to reproduce it."

Go out and pick up the book today. Delve into this wonderful work by Milan Kundera!

It is true that 'Farewell Waltz' is among Kundera's lighter novels and does not pack as much of a philosophical punch as some of his other works. However this is not to say that it lacks the gifted Kunderian touch.

What Kundera presents us with here is an examination of the complications that can be encountered where matters of the heart are concerned. The characters of 'Farewell Waltz' are plagued with inconquerable passions, raging jealousies and, at times, appallingly shallow self-interestedness.
These potentially unpleasant characteristics however form a potent and entertaining mix for the reader, as well as a novel that is not short on depth and examinations of the emotional turmoil that the human mind is prone to.

Although the characters of this novel are somewhat more unpleasant than those in Kundera's other offerings. 'Farewell Waltz' is still a good read and an interesting aside in the career of a great writer.

This is quite simply the best of Kundera. Not the most philosophical, although there is that, but the one which introduces readers outside Europe with a very accessible alternative to our expectations of novels. This is not a comedy but it will make you laugh tears from devilish cleverness. Read the first line, its beauty will pull you in.

As in most of Kundera's Czech novels a narrative woven from several strands (with each strand firmly linked to a specific character) forms a structure that allows the author to speak of his own political, ethical, and even metaphysical concerns through the voices of his choir of nine characters (I include the unnamed police inspector who appears in the book's final section along with the eight named characters). Thus we get a book that combines a fairly simple (and traditional) story with "the novel of ideas". Before going farther along this line it's helpful to stop to see where this work fits in Kundera's long and varied career as a writer. The book was published in Czech in 1973, followed by a 1976 French translation, then a 1986 French version revised and "prepared by the author" on which the English translation by Aaron Asher in 1998 is based. The Czech version was probably banned within Czechoslovakia at the time of its publication elsewhere. The period of its writing was during the first three or four years of the long political and cultural winter that descended upon Czechoslovakia in consequence of the Russian military incursion that was a response to the Prague Spring of 1968. In this context politics was thematically inescapable, though Kundera has availed himself of allegorical means (openly commented upon as just that, a somewhat "postmodernist" touch, but not done n a heavy-handed way) to treat with it.

First, the story. It might be characterized as a love-story or potential love-quadrangle story in which "love" must be considered in ironical brackets because each of its four participants experiences an idea of love as "total possession of another" or as a response to anxiety and fear. Ruzena, a nurse at a small-town spa, has been made pregnant either by a local workman, Frantisek, who is devoted to her but whom she affects to despise because a marriage to him will fix her destiny forever in what she considers to be a dead-end life, or by Klima, a well known jazz trumpeter who had a one-night stand with her. Ruzena imagines that a more serious affair with him might lead to marriage and an exciting life in the big city, a way out of the drudgery of her present life. Her pregnancy is a weapon in this campaign. Klima is terrified by the prospect of this entanglement, especially because it might damage his marriage to Kamila. He imagines that he has a deep and abiding love for Kamila, but in fact his condition seems to be a case of total emotional dependency on her based on the idea that she is selflessly dedicated to him in spite of her constant suspicion of his affairs (he has become Kamila's whole world, and he likes the idea of such reverence focused on him. The plot is driven by Klima's need to resolve the problem of the unwanted pregnancy (and possible blackmail or worse) by pretending to feel deeply for Ruzena in order to convince her to have an abortion, at which point she will cease to be a threat to his marriage. This entails returning to the spa and recruiting the aid of its chief gynecological physician, Dr. Skreta.

Skreta is an admirable "oddball character", bubbling over with eccentric ideas which he is determined to realize in life, including an avocation as a jazz drummer, and, more importantly, a bizarre eugenics program that results in curing his patients' fertility problems by artificially (and secretly) inseminating them with his own seed, thereby producing a whole army of little Skretas. As presented by Kundera this does not have the sinister character it often takes on in films and television shows depicting medical madmen who wish to replicate themselves all over the place, but seems to be a gesture from the good doctor that is both benign and practical; it might even be a step toward that ideal condition in which all men brothers. Skreta is also working on a life-plan that will depend on certain commitments from another patient at the spa who is equally odd and colorful, but in an entirely different manner, Bertlef. Skreta wants Bertlef to adopt him but doesn't know how to raise the subject. Bertlef is a wealthy Czech-American who is literally a wandering Saint and dispenser of ethical wisdom, while at the same time being a sensualist, womanizer, gourmand, and sage, merry uncle. His sainthood is manifested by the emanation of a blue halo above his head whenever he is in a state of happiness (or supreme self-satisfaction, as a cynic would have it).

Into this ménage wanders Jakub, a lifelong friend of Skreta, who is stopping by the spa to bid goodbye to the Doctor and to Jakub's somewhat sickly ward, Olga, whom he has entrusted to the Doctor's care. Jakub is a former victim of political persecution and imprisonment, but he has toed the line sufficiently to win permission to travel abroad, and he does not intend to return. His trip to the spa is his final farewell to Skreta and Olga and his valediction to his country. After some rather unsettling events at the spa, as he waltzes out the country, so to speak, he suddenly discovers he has mixed feelings of love and hate about his homeland; more distressingly he feels he knows nothing useful or real about his homeland due to his decades of "high-minded" abstract thinking that have sealed him off from commonplace dealings with and feelings about his fellow men and women, who have become politicized ciphers in his own mind. He has begun to view every action he takes or refrains from taking as symbolic of his inner character as it is challenged by tests set by God or what ever higher power might govern human life. This attitude plays a role in an inadvertent "murder" whose victim I will not reveal here. A poison pill held in readiness for suicide by Jakub is the instrument of death.

The murder is believed to be a suicide by half the characters, and its "motive" and nature are completely misunderstood by the others, excepting Bertlef, whose only concern is that people not think badly of the victim, who, he believes, has just begun to blossom as an admirable human being, and who therefore would have been incapable of taking her own life. On a personal note, given Kundera's departure from Czechoslovakia and resettlement in France in 1975, the depiction of Jakub is something of a self-portrait done at a time when Kundera may have been debating with himself about what his relationship with his native country and culture should or could be, and what his commitments to a broader notion of European literature might require of him. His final decision about this (to emigrate and to begin writing in French)remains a contentious issue in his native country and perhaps in his own mind. (Many a Czech would agree with the sentiment of the closing, minatory lines of one of their most treasured patriotic poems, Kde muj domo, that if you leave your homeland, it won't die but you will; i.e., you will be bereft of the most important sources of your being. They apply this wisdom to the "Kundera case", but it seems entirely mistaken, both in fact and in interpretation.)

Within this framework of intersecting fates Skreta, Jakub, Olga, and Bertlef carry on a debate with each other and another debate with themselves through interior "dialogues" (i.e., the self against itself) about what is truly important in life, and what are the real possibilities, including erotic ones, of becoming fully human. Ruzena, at first opaque to herself and willing to accept conventional definitions of herself and what constitutes the Good in life, joins the debate late, as does Kamila, both awakened by becoming the objects of genuine affection. The sudden appearance of the unnamed police inspector, who debates Bertlef over murder versus suicide, adds the Czech touch of the philosophical policeman that dates back to K. Capek's policemen in his Tales from Two Pockets. This leaves Klima the only one who learns nothing solid from the events that transpire.

In this series of discussions and interior debates several themes from Kundera's earlier novels, The Joke and Life is Elsewhere, are reprised in highly condensed form: the pitfalls of the "lyrical temperament" seen in youth and in perverted political formulas grounded in enthusiasm for harmful abstractions; the need for an ironic stance in the face of society's illusions; the nature of love and its sexual expression; endless doubts about one's self-worth; the subterfuges used to avoid esteem-damaging inquiry about the self and its relations to others; the role of art in society; the distinctions between self-aware individuals and "mass men and women" who base their lives on fear of a misstep; crowd psychology; and the mixture of lovability and viciousness in mankind. As noted above some of this discourse is advanced through conversations, while some of it emerges in interior monologues/dialogues. There's even a "Christian perspective" advanced through Kundera's two protean mouthpieces, Bertlef and Skreta, the former an unorthodox believer (and virtual Saint), the latter a religious skeptic. Kundera portrays these two men with a kind of backhanded affection that gives the nod to an acceptance of the basic message of Christ as they - and he - understand it: love, brotherhood, and forgiveness of one's fellow man for his repetitious failings, all unfiltered through ecclesiastical or theological traditions. Any step toward the institutionalization of such spiritual ideas (such as churches, hierarchies, dogma) will lead to another form of human oppression being established - when it comes to morality and spirituality, better to be an oddball like Skreta or a wandering minstrel like Bertlef.

Political commentary on the degraded quality of public life in Czechoslovakia, and how it pervades the private mind, is illustrated by the activities of Ruzena's father. He is a member of a group of old men who devote themselves to rounding up stray dogs. The allegory here is straightforward - the authoritarian old men obsessed with an ideal of "public order" are to the poor, carefree, likable mutts who allegedly "pollute" the public gardens of the spa town as the Party and its security organs are to the constantly harassed and harried citizens of the Party-State; individual conscience and even acts such as clemency toward "offenders" against public order are the common man's form of pollution in the eyes of the authorities.

The "outside" contemporary literary influence that seems to inform this work is what was called, in its heyday, "magic realism" (with G. G. Marquez as its most renowned practitioner). "Saint" Lazarus Bertlef is certainly a magical-realist character. By the way, his name refers not to the resurrected Lazarus but to a Byzantine painter threatened by the officially sponsored movement of Iconoclasm. But things are not so simple as this, because Kundera has at his disposal the resources of an earlier form of this narrative approach, surrealism. This was a powerful trend in Czech arts and letters during the 1930s. The practitioners of the Czech variants of surrealism (V. Nezval, K. Teige, and J. Styrsky , for example) were successful at home and abroad, and, although by the 1970s they may have been forgotten in the broader world of European literature, they were living memories in the minds of Kundera and his literary compatriots.

Some readers will interpret the strong male-female contrasts (about what constitutes a meaningful and full life as viewed from their equally "boxed in" positions of both sexes in the Czechoslovakia of the era depicted) as unremittingly sexist, even so for the flattering, adulatory depiction of female character by Bertlef. I think this would be a mistake because the story's line implies that the same means of human redemption (which signal what a meaningful life might be) are recommended and available to men and women in equal measure. The reader can dig this message out for himself/herself.

On a final note I should mention the novel's structure and its translation. In line with Kundera's education as a musician and his obvious admiration for "musical thinking", the book might be viewed as a five-movement symphony (it is divided into five sections, "First Day", Second Day", etc.). The first three movements each introduce new characters/themes, and the culmination takes place in the fourth movement where all forces collide. The culmination entails three simultaneous acts of copulation between one likely and two unlikely couples. One is experienced as genuine and liberating to both partners; the second is physically normal, but psychologically repulsive to one partner and satisfactory to the other partner, on the basis of manipulation rather than affection; and the third is highly unsatisfying to both partners, due to the temporary impotence of the man. Kundera often writes such variations on possible pairings, especially those involving mutual illusions and asymmetries that are like twistings of Goethe's good old "elective affinities" between the sexes, which were modeled on chemical attractions. After this book Kundera moved this interest into the depiction of highly structured, occasionally bizarre, and sometimes farcical sex games. The fifth movement of the work is a sort of diminuendo and coda, ending on an improbable happy note. The language of the 1998 edition is straightforward, tending toward the colloquial. Despite the recurrent Kundera themes, the voices of the characters are individuated. Since the translation is by A. Asher, it presumably has the often-withheld Kundera seal of approval.

It is a strange story .. at the beginning you might think it is one of those books dealing with something that could happen everyday .. but the way the characters are woven into the story .. the complications and the revelations of each one of them is way extreme!

A five day adventure .. a hideous ride .. a mockery of human life .. six different characters.. none of them was happy or satisfied with what he/she had .. each one of them wanted more and something better .. and took hard measures to reach their goals just like Dr. Skreta whom I think is ironically funny, smart and desperate!

Kundera keeps you in touch with his characters .. you know what they think and how they feel .. you know their weaknesses and their strengths .. and what they want to accomplish ..yet I didn't expect such a tragedy!
Read it and enjoy!