Description
Published simultaneously with Identity, his new novel, here is a masterful new translation of Milan Kundera’s most brilliantly plotted and sheerly entertaining novel — a dark farce of sex, murder, and motherhood. Set in an Old-Fashioned Central European Spa Town, The Farewell Party follows the lives of eight characters: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynaecologist; a rich American who is at once a saint and a Don Juan; a popular trumpeter and his beautiful obsessively jealous wife; a disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young female ward. Perhaps the most accessible of Milan Kundera’s novels, The Farewell Party 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. Translated from the French text prepared by the author himself a quarter century after the novel was originally written, The Farewell Party sparkles anew with wit, humor, and irony. It offers readers a chance to discover, or rediscover, one of the very best works of a legendary writer.
“It is hard to imagine anything more chilling and profound that Kundera’s apparent lightheartedness”. Elizabeth Pochoda
“Kundera … remains faithful to this subtle, wily, devious talent for a fiction of ‘erotic possibilities”. New York Times Book Review
