Immortality

Agnes is dying. From her deathbed she meditates on what she has loved, what she has become, and the gap — always present, always widening — between the self we experience from the inside and the image of us that the world constructs and that will survive us. Kundera’s Immortality is his most ambitious novel: a meditation on fame, identity, and the question of what it means to be a person in a world saturated with images of people — images that outlast, distort, and ultimately replace the originals.

The novel is formally extraordinary: Kundera appears as a character, converses with his own creations, reflects on the act of writing, and moves between twentieth-century Paris and nineteenth-century Germany (where Goethe and Bettina von Arnim conduct their own argument about the relationship between the person and their image) with complete formal confidence.

The summit of Kundera’s novelistic achievement — essential for anyone who has read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and wants to understand the full ambition of his project. Published by Faber & Faber.