Immortality [Paperback]

Milan Kundera (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers (1994)
• ASIN: B0029YYJY8
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (71 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Re-read it!, July 13, 2004

By 

Zafiro Blue (St. Louis, Missouri) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Immortality (Perennial Classics) (Paperback)

First of all - don't read this if you haven't read either "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" or "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." "Immortality" is more difficult than both of them and should therefore be read later; but not only that, the allusions to some of Kundera's earlier ideas (the border, the unbearable lightness of being) will missed if you read this first.

Second - how much you put into will be how much you get. Don't read this as a novel; read it as a treasure buried under 350 pages of prose - you'll find many nuggets, but it will take work to grasp them and they won't combine to form a fully-formed unified slab of gold.

Third - it's not really about immortality. It's about life, existence, and so on - the essential human themes.

Fourth - it suffers from Kundera's fatal flaw, his refusal to use the literary technique of a book's climax to make the sharpest point. The effect on the reader (and the point of literature, in my opinion, is to make the largest possible effect on the reader) would be much greater if the ending of part five ended the actual novel. I have nothing against Kundera briefly giving away the end in the middle of the novel, which he does in "Being" as well. It's a technique that he uses very well. But how much more so if the characters' ending came at the *book's* ending!

Finally - I'm not sure which rating to give to "Immortality." I first put 4 stars, as it has serious flaws (namely, it doesn't truly form exactly one work and the experimentalism does not always work - put at the climax where it belongs!). But I'd be kidding myself if 20% percent of the books I read are better than "Immortality," I think. I'll end up giving it five, but with caution. The more I reread it, which I have done recently, the more I like it. Five it is, barely. However, I think I hold Kundera to a higher standard - he has such talent; he could use it better.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unique, August 31, 2002

By 

Reverend_Maynard (Glasgow, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Immortality (Perennial Classics) (Paperback)

This was the first Kundera I read, as a result of a friends recomendation, and I was extremely immpressed.
Mr Kundera creates a novel of that rare species here: essentially I am unable to classify it, yet it made me think more deeply than usual and consider the entire world in an entirely different light when I managed to drag myself away from its pages.
The novel opens with Kundera himself witnessing an old woman making a gesture which he believes belies her age: quickly Kundera considers the fact that gestures themselves are immortal: many people have lived throughout history but they have utilized relatively few gestures.
Surprisingly, Kundera weaves an entire character out of this simple gesture, invents friends, relatives, thoughts and feelings for her, and eventually manages to intertwine her life with his own, projecting himself into his own novel, although so subtely do the two stories interlock that when we suddenly realise what has occured slow and joyful understanding blossoms upon our faces.
Along the way, Kundera uses the tale of the great German poet Goethe and the woman Bettina Von Arnim as a kind of historical paradigm for his modern tragedy, paints us a brief but fantastical picture of Hemingway and Goethe conversing beyond this worlds boundaries and, of course, muses upon the nature of Immortality, as well as tackling serious world issues with characteristic Kundera informality.
Kundera is witty and profound: many of the social and cultural observations included in this book made me laugh out loud. His discourse on such diverse subjects as music, world government, sex and the paths gossip take are so wonderfully woven into the primary story they seem to creep into your brain and only surface later, at which point one can nod admiringly at Kundera's wisdom.
Undoubtedly, a book I would not heitate to recommend, this novel should be read carefully and lovingly by eveyone.
Rabidly intelligent, astonishingly well written, ambitious, experimental and indispensable to the thoughtful reader.

40 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is......Immortal!, March 5, 2000

By 

D. Roberts "Hadrian12" (Battle Creek, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Immortality (Paperback)

If you like straightforward books with straightforward plots, straightforward characters and straightforward beginnings, storylines and conclusions, this book may not for you.

The novel takes place in the present, in the past, in the afterlife & in the surreal world of Kundera's imagination. The work has several different seemingly separate stories that Kundera somehow weaves into a coherent whole. We meet people that we are led to believe actually exist who talk with the author during "intermissions" of the novel. Later, we learn that Kundera was discussing topics with the characters in his novel.

The book has sundry marvelous sections which brood over just about every intellectual topic associated with immortality. We see an eloborate (although fictionalized) glimpse of Goethe's historical meeting with Napoleon. We get an impression of how many great artists look upon their craft as mementos of their immortality. We even get an answer to the $60,000 question: WHAT would happen if Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Earnest Hemingway met up in the afterlife? (Wow! What a thought!)

As I mentioned earlier, this book does not have the standard structure of most other novels. That said, however, it was quite enjoyable to read. It did not go off the deep end of Faulkneresque stream-of-consciousness psycho-babble. An excellent and entertaining postmodern effort.