Milan Kundera’s "Immortality," a summary

This philosophical novel by Czech-French writer Milan Kundera was written in 1988 and published in French in 1990. It concludes the author’s reflections, continued in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In 1991, the novel won the British Prize for Best Translated Prose. The narrative combines fictional events from the lives of contemporaries in France with essayistic chapters on Goethe, Beethoven, and Hemingway. The book’s central theme is an exploration of how the desire to be remembered shapes actions and changes personality.

The birth of the heroine and the phenomenon of gesture

The narrative begins with the author observing an elderly woman by the pool at a Parisian sports club. Saying goodbye to the instructor, the woman makes a graceful wave of her hand, typical of a twenty-year-old. This brief episode prompts the author to consider that gesture is more individual than the individual: there are billions of people on Earth, yet the range of movement is significantly smaller. From this captured wave, the author imagines the main character, Agnès.

Agnès lives in Paris with her husband, Paul, and their adult daughter, Brigitte. She suffers from the all-pervasive noise, the visual chaos of the capital, and the need to constantly control her appearance. To her, the human face is a random serial number generated by the Creator’s computer. Unlike most people around her, Agnès craves solitude and finds inner peace in rare trips to the Alps, the birthplace of her deceased father.

Agnès’s sister, Laura, exhibits the opposite approach to life. While Agnès uses subtraction, stripping away all externals from her self to find her true essence, Laura employs addition. She continually adds external attributes to her personality: a Siamese cat, passionate hobbies, eccentric outfits, dark glasses, and turbulent love affairs.

Extraterrestrial Conversations and Categories of Memory

The book’s parallel layer transports the reader to a transcendental world where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Ernest Hemingway converse. Both writers suffer the weight of their own immortality. Posthumous fame proves not to be an eternal triumph, but an endless trial, where bourgeois critics and biographers dissect the authors’ personal sins, intimate details, and everyday blunders. Goethe shares with Hemingway a memory of a dream in which the audience came to see him, not his play "Faust," but himself.

Kundera meticulously examines the relationship between sixty-year-old Goethe and the young Bettina von Arnim, née Brentano. Bettina, a representative of Romanticism, strives to enter history through her closeness to the great poet. For her, love is a means of securing a place in eternal memory. Goethe sees her as a threat to his autobiography and calls her a meddlesome person. A meeting with Beethoven in Teplitz in 1812, when the composer refused to doff his hat to the imperial family, is transformed, through Bettina’s efforts, into a legend about a rebellious and sycophantic poet.

The author divides immortality into minor immortality — the memory of loved ones and acquaintances — and major immortality — the memory of unknown descendants. A separate category is comical immortality, when a person is remembered by descendants not for their works, but for a curious detail or an absurd death, like the astronomer Tycho Brahe, who died of a ruptured bladder due to observing etiquette.

The struggle for image and imagology

In modern society, traditional ideologies have been replaced by imagology — the power of image-makers, advertisers, and journalists. Public opinion is shaped not by real facts, but by polls, photos, and concisely formulated slogans. People cease to be their own selves, becoming their own media image.

Laura begins an affair with a young radio journalist, Bernard Bertrand, the son of the prominent politician Bertrand Bertrand. When Bernard’s portrait appears on the station’s advertising posters, a nameless prankster awards him a diploma for being a "100% ass." This absurd incident plunges Bernard into a profound crisis. He begins to distance himself from Laura, feeling that her mature age and exaltation threaten his social status.

Agnès’s husband, Paul, is a lawyer and hosts a weekly radio program. Due to demands from imagologists for a more streamlined radio program, his program is canceled. Paul is deeply affected by his resignation but finds support in his daughter, Brigitte. Laure, trying to keep Bernard, blackmails him with the threat of suicide and goes to Martinique to find him. Agnès and Paul worry about Laura, but Agnès understands that her sister’s emotional suffering is a means of manipulation and self-affirmation.

Avenarius’s Guerrilla Warfare and Agnès’s Decision

Paul’s friend, Professor Avenarius, wages a personal guerrilla war against the total ugliness and mechanization of life. At night, he runs through Paris, stabbing the tires of parked cars, calling it a way to preserve personal freedom in a world of indifference. He acts without political goals, transforming rebellion into an individual game against the hustle and bustle of society.

Agnès decides to change her life and move to Bern, Switzerland, where she’s been offered a new job. She dreams of living alone, maintaining her love for her husband and daughter from a distance, without the daily pressure of their gazes. Heading to the Alps to finalize her decision, she experiences a rare sense of harmony with her surroundings.

Returning to France by car, Agnès is involved in a tragic accident. On a highway at night, a young girl drives right into the roadway, attempting to commit suicide. The drivers in front of her swerve sharply, resulting in a serious accident with multiple casualties. Agnès suffers fatal injuries and dies in a provincial hospital shortly before Paul arrives. Before she dies, she asks the nurse not to call anyone and quietly passes away, freed from the burden of her ego.

The Dial of Being and the End of History

In the sixth part of the novel, a character nicknamed Rubens appears — an erotomaniac whose life’s journey is represented by a clock face. Each phase of his relationships with women alternates like the movement of the planets: from athletic muteness and poetic metaphors to crude frankness, erotic mysticism, and, finally, a complete loss of interest in new relationships. Only a few frozen images remain in his memory, among which the image of Agnès, whom he once met in Rome, stands out. Upon learning of her death, Rubens realizes that his erotic clock has come full circle.

After Agnès’s death, Paul and Laura become closer. A sense of shared loss and a long-held attraction lead Laura to move into Paul’s apartment and bear him a child. Ordinary life triumphs over past tragedies, transforming past passions into elements of a new family structure.

In the final part of the narrative, the writer, Professor Avenarius, and Paul meet by the pool at the same Parisian club. Paul appears aged but reconciled to his fate: he is surrounded by four women — his returned daughter Brigitte, his newborn granddaughter, a young child, and Laura. As she leaves the pool, Laura turns and makes that same light, graceful wave of her hand that once evoked the image of Agnès in the author’s imagination. The cycle closes, leaving the heroes facing the eternal rotation of life’s variations.