Farewell Waltz: A Novel
Written by Milan Kundera
Narrated by Richmond Hoxie
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
""After Farewell Waltz there cannot be any doubt. Kundera is a master of contemporary literature. This novel is both an an example of virtuosity and a descent into the human soul."" —L'Unite
Set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, Farewell Waltz 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.
In this dark farce of a novel, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American (at once saint and Don Juan); a popular trumpeter and his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife; and an disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward. It is perhaps the most brilliantly plotted and sheer entertaining of Milan Kundera's novels.
Written in Bohemia in 1969-70, the book was first published (in 1976) in France under the title La valse aux adieux (Farewell Waltz), and later in thirty-four other countries. This beautiful translation, made from the French text prepared by the novelist himself, fully reflects Kundera's own tone and intentions, and offers an opportunity for both the discovery and the rediscovery of one of the very best of a great writer's works.
Milan Kundera
The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929 - 2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves—all originally in Czech. His later novels, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance, and The Festival of Insignificance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.
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Reviews for Farewell Waltz
342 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Lovely book, recognizable Kundera style. Full of humor and unconventional ideas. Great audio quality!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A mildly farcical romantic intrigue, involving various couples over a 5 day period in a fertility period. Kundera demonstrates the unpredictable and random nature of associations, and the distances between intimates.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The memory of this one contains something jagged, like a sharp lazily tossed into a bin liner, only to poke an unsuspecting leg on the way out to the street. This novel whispers you might not recreate the plot but the deceipt will cling to your hair and clothes.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5pretty sweet. Kundera remains one of those authors who can leave me consistently and completely disoriented.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Reading this thirty years on, I can't help wondering why we were all so bowled over by Kundera back in the eighties. It's a flimsy black comedy without very much to say, and reads more like a film script than a novel. What cleverness there is comes over as movie-cleverness: rapid scene changes, parallel stories, throwaway lines. The whole mood is profoundly sexist, and there's no evidence to suggest that Kundera intended any irony by setting the story in a fertility spa: this is still the old world where men sit around discussing life, the universe and everything, whilst women fulfil themselves by having babies. If their husbands can't manage it, there's the good doctor to cure them with his magic syringe. As so often with translations, the (UK) English title seems to have been thought up by someone who hasn't read the book. There is neither a party nor any dancing in the book, but Farewell Waltz (corresponding to La valse aux adieux, the title of the original French edition) makes sense in a way that The Farewell Party doesn't: you can have a metaphorical waltz, but who ever heard of a metaphorical party?
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5everything by kundera seems to define melancholy. this is one of my favorites.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Spanning five days in a Czechoslovakian fertility resort, this is a light(ish), breezy, humorous novel of romance, deception, life decisions and good byes.Razena, a nurse at the clinic, is pregnant and has decided renowned trumpet play Klima is the father of the child - not the clumsy and desperate teenager Franti. Klima is horrified at the news and tries to talk her into having an abortion, using a rackety reverse psychology tactic dictated to him by his band. Political liability Jakob is at the resort to say his good-byes to a couple of friends before leaving the country for good. Olga desperatly wants to be his lover rather than his sort-of stepdaugther, once at least. Klima's wife is torn by her jealousy and scared of finding proof at the same time. And doctor Skreta, who himself might be the father of all the children concieved through insemination at the clinic, tries to give American millioneer Bertlef subtle hints to adopt him as his son.It's a clever and fast-paced weave Kundera gives us here, full of twists and even with a bit of "ticking bomb" suspension in the form of a tablet of poison being mixed in with medical pills. It would undoubtedly make a good film or play.What brings the rating down by at least one star for me is the book's stale sexism. Even though there are as many female characters as male ones in this polyphonic novel, the tilted balance is striking. The men think and talk about existence, religion, friendship and the nature of women. The women think about the men they are hot for. In the book's concluding "solution", it becomes rather unpleasant and cynical in (as far as I can tell) a rather unintended way.