Farewell Waltz: A Novel

As in most of Kundera's Czech novels a narrative woven from several strands (with each strand firmly linked to a specific character) forms a structure that allows the author to speak of his own political, ethical, and even metaphysical concerns through the voices of his choir of nine characters (I include the unnamed police inspector who appears in the book's final section along with the eight named characters). Thus we get a book that combines a fairly simple (and traditional) story with "the novel of ideas". Before going farther along this line it's helpful to stop to see where this work fits in Kundera's long and varied career as a writer. The book was published in Czech in 1973, followed by a 1976 French translation, then a 1986 French version revised and "prepared by the author" on which the English translation by Aaron Asher in 1998 is based. The Czech version was probably banned within Czechoslovakia at the time of its publication elsewhere. The period of its writing was during the first three or four years of the long political and cultural winter that descended upon Czechoslovakia in consequence of the Russian military incursion that was a response to the Prague Spring of 1968. In this context politics was thematically inescapable, though Kundera has availed himself of allegorical means (openly commented upon as just that, a somewhat "postmodernist" touch, but not done n a heavy-handed way) to treat with it. First, the story. It might be characterized as a love-story or potential love-quadrangle story in which "love" must be considered in ironical brackets because each of its four participants experiences an idea of love as "total possession of another" or as a response to anxiety and fear. Ruzena, a nurse at a small-town spa, has been made pregnant either by a local workman, Frantisek, who is devoted to her but whom she affects to despise because a marriage to him will fix her destiny forever in what she considers to be a dead-end life, or by Klima, a well known jazz trumpeter who had a one-night stand with her. Ruzena imagines that a more serious affair with him might lead to marriage and an exciting life in the big city, a way out of the drudgery of her present life. Her pregnancy is a weapon in this campaign. Klima is terrified by the prospect of this entanglement, especially because it might damage his marriage to Kamila. He imagines that he has a deep and abiding love for Kamila, but in fact his condition seems to be a case of total emotional dependency on her based on the idea that she is selflessly dedicated to him in spite of her constant suspicion of his affairs (he has become Kamila's whole world, and he likes the idea of such reverence focused on him. The plot is driven by Klima's need to resolve the problem of the unwanted pregnancy (and possible blackmail or worse) by pretending to feel deeply for Ruzena in order to convince her to have an abortion, at which point she will cease to be a threat to his marriage. This entails returning to the spa and recruiting the aid of its chief gynecological physician, Dr. Skreta. Skreta is an admirable "oddball character", bubbling over with eccentric ideas which he is determined to realize in life, including an avocation as a jazz drummer, and, more importantly, a bizarre eugenics program that results in curing his patients' fertility problems by artificially (and secretly) inseminating them with his own seed, thereby producing a whole army of little Skretas. As presented by Kundera this does not have the sinister character it often takes on in films and television shows depicting medical madmen who wish to replicate themselves all over the place, but seems to be a gesture from the good doctor that is both benign and practical; it might even be a step toward that ideal condition in which all men brothers. Skreta is also working on a life-plan that will depend on certain commitments from another patient at the spa who is equally odd and colorful, but in an entirely different manner, Bertlef. Skreta wants Bertlef to adopt him but doesn't know how to raise the subject. Bertlef is a wealthy Czech-American who is literally a wandering Saint and dispenser of ethical wisdom, while at the same time being a sensualist, womanizer, gourmand, and sage, merry uncle. His sainthood is manifested by the emanation of a blue halo above his head whenever he is in a state of happiness (or supreme self-satisfaction, as a cynic would have it). Into this ménage wanders Jakub, a lifelong friend of Skreta, who is stopping by the spa to bid goodbye to the Doctor and to Jakub's somewhat sickly ward, Olga, whom he has entrusted to the Doctor's care. Jakub is a former victim of political persecution and imprisonment, but he has toed the line sufficiently to win permission to travel abroad, and he does not intend to return. His trip to the spa is his final farewell to Skreta and Olga and his valediction to his country. After some rather unsettling events at the spa, as he waltzes out the country, so to speak, he suddenly discovers he has mixed feelings of love and hate about his homeland; more distressingly he feels he knows nothing useful or real about his homeland due to his decades of "high-minded" abstract thinking that have sealed him off from commonplace dealings with and feelings about his fellow men and women, who have become politicized ciphers in his own mind. He has begun to view every action he takes or refrains from taking as symbolic of his inner character as it is challenged by tests set by God or what ever higher power might govern human life. This attitude plays a role in an inadvertent "murder" whose victim I will not reveal here. A poison pill held in readiness for suicide by Jakub is the instrument of death. The murder is believed to be a suicide by half the characters, and its "motive" and nature are completely misunderstood by the others, excepting Bertlef, whose only concern is that people not think badly of the victim, who, he believes, has just begun to blossom as an admirable human being, and who therefore would have been incapable of taking her own life. On a personal note, given Kundera's departure from Czechoslovakia and resettlement in France in 1975, the depiction of Jakub is something of a self-portrait done at a time when Kundera may have been debating with himself about what his relationship with his native country and culture should or could be, and what his commitments to a broader notion of European literature might require of him. His final decision about this (to emigrate and to begin writing in French)remains a contentious issue in his native country and perhaps in his own mind. (Many a Czech would agree with the sentiment of the closing, minatory lines of one of their most treasured patriotic poems, Kde muj domo, that if you leave your homeland, it won't die but you will; i.e., you will be bereft of the most important sources of your being. They apply this wisdom to the "Kundera case", but it seems entirely mistaken, both in fact and in interpretation.) Within this framework of intersecting fates Skreta, Jakub, Olga, and Bertlef carry on a debate with each other and another debate with themselves through interior "dialogues" (i.e., the self against itself) about what is truly important in life, and what are the real possibilities, including erotic ones, of becoming fully human. Ruzena, at first opaque to herself and willing to accept conventional definitions of herself and what constitutes the Good in life, joins the debate late, as does Kamila, both awakened by becoming the objects of genuine affection. The sudden appearance of the unnamed police inspector, who debates Bertlef over murder versus suicide, adds the Czech touch of the philosophical policeman that dates back to K. Capek's policemen in his Tales from Two Pockets. This leaves Klima the only one who learns nothing solid from the events that transpire. In this series of discussions and interior debates several themes from Kundera's earlier novels, The Joke and Life is Elsewhere, are reprised in highly condensed form: the pitfalls of the "lyrical temperament" seen in youth and in perverted political formulas grounded in enthusiasm for harmful abstractions; the need for an ironic stance in the face of society's illusions; the nature of love and its sexual expression; endless doubts about one's self-worth; the subterfuges used to avoid esteem-damaging inquiry about the self and its relations to others; the role of art in society; the distinctions between self-aware individuals and "mass men and women" who base their lives on fear of a misstep; crowd psychology; and the mixture of lovability and viciousness in mankind. As noted above some of this discourse is advanced through conversations, while some of it emerges in interior monologues/dialogues. There's even a "Christian perspective" advanced through Kundera's two protean mouthpieces, Bertlef and Skreta, the former an unorthodox believer (and virtual Saint), the latter a religious skeptic. Kundera portrays these two men with a kind of backhanded affection that gives the nod to an acceptance of the basic message of Christ as they - and he - understand it: love, brotherhood, and forgiveness of one's fellow man for his repetitious failings, all unfiltered through ecclesiastical or theological traditions. Any step toward the institutionalization of such spiritual ideas (such as churches, hierarchies, dogma) will lead to another form of human oppression being established - when it comes to morality and spirituality, better to be an oddball like Skreta or a wandering minstrel like Bertlef. Political commentary on the degraded quality of public life in Czechoslovakia, and how it pervades the private mind, is illustrated by the activities of Ruzena's father. He is a member of a group of old men who devote themselves to rounding up stray dogs. The allegory here is straightforward - the authoritarian old men obsessed with an ideal of "public order" are to the poor, carefree, likable mutts who allegedly "pollute" the public gardens of the spa town as the Party and its security organs are to the constantly harassed and harried citizens of the Party-State; individual conscience and even acts such as clemency toward "offenders" against public order are the common man's form of pollution in the eyes of the authorities. The "outside" contemporary literary influence that seems to inform this work is what was called, in its heyday, "magic realism" (with G. G. Marquez as its most renowned practitioner). "Saint" Lazarus Bertlef is certainly a magical-realist character. By the way, his name refers not to the resurrected Lazarus but to a Byzantine painter threatened by the officially sponsored movement of Iconoclasm. But things are not so simple as this, because Kundera has at his disposal the resources of an earlier form of this narrative approach, surrealism. This was a powerful trend in Czech arts and letters during the 1930s. The practitioners of the Czech variants of surrealism (V. Nezval, K. Teige, and J. Styrsky , for example) were successful at home and abroad, and, although by the 1970s they may have been forgotten in the broader world of European literature, they were living memories in the minds of Kundera and his literary compatriots. Some readers will interpret the strong male-female contrasts (about what constitutes a meaningful and full life as viewed from their equally "boxed in" positions of both sexes in the Czechoslovakia of the era depicted) as unremittingly sexist, even so for the flattering, adulatory depiction of female character by Bertlef. I think this would be a mistake because the story's line implies that the same means of human redemption (which signal what a meaningful life might be) are recommended and available to men and women in equal measure. The reader can dig this message out for himself/herself. On a final note I should mention the novel's structure and its translation. In line with Kundera's education as a musician and his obvious admiration for "musical thinking", the book might be viewed as a five-movement symphony (it is divided into five sections, "First Day", Second Day", etc.). The first three movements each introduce new characters/themes, and the culmination takes place in the fourth movement where all forces collide. The culmination entails three simultaneous acts of copulation between one likely and two unlikely couples. One is experienced as genuine and liberating to both partners; the second is physically normal, but psychologically repulsive to one partner and satisfactory to the other partner, on the basis of manipulation rather than affection; and the third is highly unsatisfying to both partners, due to the temporary impotence of the man. Kundera often writes such variations on possible pairings, especially those involving mutual illusions and asymmetries that are like twistings of Goethe's good old "elective affinities" between the sexes, which were modeled on chemical attractions. After this book Kundera moved this interest into the depiction of highly structured, occasionally bizarre, and sometimes farcical sex games. The fifth movement of the work is a sort of diminuendo and coda, ending on an improbable happy note. The language of the 1998 edition is straightforward, tending toward the colloquial. Despite the recurrent Kundera themes, the voices of the characters are individuated. Since the translation is by A. Asher, it presumably has the often-withheld Kundera seal of approval.

Definitely my favorite book I've had to read all school year. Very dark humor which made the story very interesting and entertaining all the way. Bought used and was in excellent condition!

Summary: Pietistic Nihilism, Subtle Narcism, Soap Opera Discourse.The story is simple soap opera fare. The characters are poorly dissimulated (that is, articulated) doppelgangers of the author. The product (a labour of ego, i.e. masturbation) is a sort of vain self-referential humor (cynicism in tartuffe airs) that seduces the reader into an alliance with the narrator(s) (Kundera) against the more or less superficial subjective reflections (Kundera) on the part of the personalities concerned (again, Kundera). The ignorant do not know: the stupid do not know they do not know. Kundera has here an expose of ignorance that is stupid-- it thinks it is 'art' being anti-art, but is merely a cipher of the culture it pretends to escape; the author is in a cave of modernity and gets off on leading others into a further permutation of it and what makes it radically evil is that he pretends to show you the way out with facile threads of irony (admitting the spiral tangent it is).This novel is not farce: it is all very calculated and nothing actually outlandish takes place. It is not satire either, because it fails to elucidate anything. It's not a parody, it parodies nothing except life because it must. As a reflection on the intransigence of Time and the senselessness of the acts by humans occurring in it, the novel succeeds only inasmuch as an image of a mirror of a mirror are shown to be mere anagrams of what is (a mirror) [This both is and should sound stupid.]. The problem: no one needs to be told this or read a book such as this to know/understand/experience what has just been described. It is one thing to laugh at the vanity of 'humanity' in the sense Schopenhauer meant (whom Kundera must be familiar with) but entirely another to laugh at one's vanity because one MUST laugh; is incontinence not the very essence of egoism?The laughter is self-conscious and most of all, forgettable. --This is not a book of laughter and forgetting. It is a book to laugh at and forget. Everyone has better things to do and books to read than this cultured trash.

My favorite book

A great book by a great artist.

Absolutely love Kundera's books!!

With one of the blackest humors, Milan Kundera starts a journey into 4 people's moment of collision: the trip allows him to analyse the regime with a skin and bone accuracy; the myths on which it was constructed and, by means of an incredible honesty dissect man. A profound novel. Food for thought for the friends of man.

as always, kundera focuses on the conflict between the sexes.the story is full of passive aggressive characters, and they are there for a reason-to be subjects of kunderas dark humor, his burlesque way of carrying out tragedies caused by "love" - or lack of it.a loves b b loves c, c doesnt care but acts like he/she does, complicating all relationships from then on, unknowingly destroying lives. there is always a wise one with a foreseeing ability who has the power of changing everything for the better but chooses to remain a bystander. there is the lovesick, and the lovestruck,and the fool and the ignorant..all there..his women are all unlikeable, sexually manipulating and emotionally assaulting the men.and as a reader one gets the feeling that all characters call for their misery by complicating their "dull" lives ,just out of boredom.it is as if all characters are in need of a whirlpool of somekind.. a classic kundera; and an underrated one

Livro em bom estado e muito bom.

I read the first 16 pages of this book, then I realized that I will not finish it. What a poor book! A child could do a better job. Embarrassing reading.....

An amazing novel. My favorite Kundera novel so far (and he has become one of my favorite writers). The plot has a grotesque inevitability about it and it resembles some sort of chess game with people instead of pieces. But as always with Kundera it is the acute insights into our minds and hearts that make his work so powerful. Even though there are less deliberate philosophical 'asides' in this novel than in the other novels of his I have read, there are just as many profound truths about the human condition and the way we interact with other human beings. A masterpiece.

Very entertaining read, nice quick light hearted read. Good for holidays.