Immortality - Milan Kundera

An unusual novel part musing, part reflection, part teaching and part discussion via conversations with Milan and his own characters.


We are introduced to a gesture at the beginning of the book from an older woman to a young swim instructor at Kundera’s health club. From that gesture he creates a female character by the name of Agnes and we follow her (tragic) story.

Inspired by a disturbing news report heard on the radio whilst Kundera is slipping in and out of sleep, Agnes ultimately becomes one of those victims.

The way he introduces his characters and shapes his story lines is very clever. We have an incident first and then the path to this outcome is delivered. Characters are woven in and out of each other and around Kundera’s own “real life” situation.

But this is also a philosophical and cautionary tale of how to live your life so that you will be remembered for the right reasons. Kundera does not want to be immortalised in a ridiculous way such as the astronomer Tycho Brahe who was reported to have died from a bladder infection because he was too ashamed to go to the toilet whilst attending a dinner at the Emperor’s Court, or because he has had a stroke whilst lifting weights as happened to Robert Musil.

Interspersed in the Agnes story line is the detail relating to the immortalization of Bettina Von Arnim via her affection for Goethe and the letters that transpired between them, though those letters had been substantially re-written to highly flatter herself. Her association to Goethe and other famous men led to her immortalization throughout history. We are subject to amusing debates with Goethe and Hemmingway in the afterlife, discussions on Beethoven and a sad ‘erotic’ sub~story relating to Agnes’s sometime lover, which has no real bearing to the novel itself but does warn against living a shallow life.

I really enjoyed this, it was so different from anything I have read before.

*It has since been revealed after opening Brahe’s grave and analysing his hair in 1996 that he may have died from Mercury Poisoning.

About The Author

Kundera was born in 1929 in Czechoslovakia, self exiled to France in 1975 due to the censoring/suppression of his work, and has been a French citizen since 1981.

In 1985 Kundera received the Jerusalem Prize, and in 2000 he was awarded the Herder Prize.

“If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they that they cannot be re-told”. Immortality

These words must have been written in retaliation for the adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, of which Kundera was very unhappy with and has since banned all future adaptations of his work.