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Leaving a Trace |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Linda Simon |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 6/1/1991 |
| Size: 3,017 Words, 18,264 Characters |
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IMMORTALITY
Milan Kundera, translated by Peter Kussi
New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991
384 pp., $21.95
"My lifetime ambition" the Czech writer Milan Kundera once told an interviewer, "has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form." In five novels, Kundera has explored questions that concern, even obsess, him: Who are we? How can we understand our essential nature? Do we know ourselves by our thoughts? Our behavior? Are we the sum of events that comprise our history? What is the connection between our biography and the underlying characteristics that define us?
These are the questions that recur in all of his fictions: The Joke, his first book, which became a major literary event during the Prague Spring of 1968 and earned Kund...
. . .
...s that Agnes is the creation of his imagination. Agnes exists because a novelist, one day, invented her and her unforgettable gesture. However speculative and uncertain that novelist may be, however much he is bound by the themes that obsess him, however much restricted by the context from which he emerges, his creations can achieve a kind of immortality denied to the rest of us mere mortals.
(821 of 18,264 characters)
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