The last novel that Kundera wrote before immigrating to France in 1975 is a dark farce on life and death. Over the course of five days in a Bohemian spa he details the loves and losses—the reverses and revelations—of an eccentric cast of characters: a jazz trumpeter whose affair with a nurse may cost him his marriage; a political dissident about to go into exile, but not before becoming an inadvertent murderer; a mad gynecologist who cures infertile patients with his own seed. There is music for the madness that Kundera discerns in this bucolic setting, and he wields his baton with the cruelest—the lightest—touch.
Areté, a British literary journal, devoted its autumn issue to a celebration of Kundera's achievement, with insightful essays by Salman Rushdie, William Boyd, Craig Raine, Adam Thirwell, and Alexander Nurnberg. Its web site is www.aretemagazine.com.
