New York Times Bestseller
"Inspired. . . . Kundera's most brilliantly imagined novel. . . . A
book that entrances, beguiles and charms us from first page to last." --
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to
her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind
of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna,
Kundera's Agnès becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable
longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the
imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme
mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great
themes of existence.