Margins
Farewell Waltz book cover
Farewell Waltz
1972
First Published
3.87
Average Rating
246
Number of Pages

Klima, a celebrated jazz trumpeter, receives a phone call announcing that a young nurse with whom he spent a brief night at a fertility spa is pregnant. She has decided he is the father. And so begins a comedy in which, during five madcap days, events unfold with ever-increasing speed. Klima's beautiful, jealous wife; the nurse's equally jealous boyfriend; a fanatical gynecologist; a rich American, at once Don Juan and saint; and an elderly political prisoner who, just before his emigration, is holding a farewell party at the spa, are all drawn into this black comedy, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream. As usual, Milan Kundera poses serious questions with a blasphemous lightness which makes us understand that the modern world has taken away our right to tragedy.

Avg Rating
3.87
Number of Ratings
18,830
5 STARS
26%
4 STARS
43%
3 STARS
25%
2 STARS
5%
1 STARS
1%
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Author

Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera
Author · 23 books

People best know Czech-born writer Milan Kundera for his novels, including The Joke (1967), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), all of which exhibit his extreme though often comical skepticism. Since 1975, he lived in exile in France and in 1981 as a naturalized citizen. Kundera wrote in Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; people therefore consider these original works as not translations. The Communist government of Czechoslovakia censored and duly banned his books from his native country, the case until the downfall of this government in the velvet revolution of 1989.

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