A novel, divided into seven parts and exploring immortality. This is the author's seventh novel. His previous works include The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He has written one play, Jacques and his Master.
Karl Leden works in the State publishing house in Prague. His work becomes complicated by the arrival of the Lenka Silver, and the reproaches of his ex-girlfriend, Vera. When a murder occurs, there are plenty of suspects - but the event is most definitely linked to Miss Silver's past.
In this dark farce of a novel, set in an old-fashioned Central Euroepean spa town, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse & her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American (at once saint & Don Juan); a popular trumpeter & his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife; an unillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country & his young woman ward. Perhaps the most brilliantly plotted & sheerly entertaining of Milan Kundera's novels, Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy. Written in Bohemia in 1969-70, this book was first published in 1976 in France under the title La valse aux adieux (Farewell Waltz), & later in thirty-four other countries. This beautiful new translation, made from the French text prepared by the novelist himself, fully reflects his own tone & intentions. As such it offers an opportunity for both the discovery & the rediscovery of one of the very best of a great writer's works.