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The Enchanter by Vladimir Nabokov
4.0
The Enchanter is a novella for the literary-minded paedophile.
I say that half in jest.
There is an opinion pervasive among Nabokov's readers that The Enchanter is the precursor to Lolita, the "Ur-Lolita," an opinion that is not entirely false. Nabokov alludes to his darling story in the author's note that opens the book stating that it was "the first little throb of Lolita," thus inspiring readers to imply countless parallels between the story in question and Lolita. The idea that The Enchanter is a relative of Lolita's, however, is an alloy of indisputable fact whose quality is marred by the lesser metals of falsehood and dissimilarity. In other words, the nameless nymphet in The Enchanter finds identification with Lolita more by way of union in the rosy Haze of youth and less as a distant relative to young Dolores. A number of Nabokov's works contain at least a slight whisper of an adult male's repressed lust for a pre-pubescent girl, which lends itself to the idea that it is not uncommon for an author to develop and elaborate on themes across numerous novels. Dmitri Nabokov elaborates on this: "It may have contained, as he [Vladimir] put it, 'the first little throb' of the later novel--and even that thesis might be questioned if one attentively examines certain earlier works of his--but we must also not forget that the arts in general pulsate with first throbs that foreshadow future, larger works...."
With that said, let us move on to the story proper.
The story details the lecherous acts and repressed lust of a central European man of middle age who seems proper at first glance, although scenes wherein he indulges in subtle, stolen strokes across the lush valleys of wispish down on a young nymphet's arms disabuses us of this idea. Perhaps the most amusing characteristics of The Enchanter is the paedophile's conflict with his criminal desires, his very forbidden nature, against the more nurturing and paternal aspects of his character. In some capacity, he wishes he could feel a fatherly love for the Parisian child but, as expected, his erotic taste for young girls supplants his sense of shame as evidenced by mental images of tentacles enveloping the girl, a wolf in pursuit of his little Red Riding Hood, and the surreal visual anomaly of the "black salad devouring a green rabbit" which seems to capture the protagonist's (is he deserving of such a title?) disoriented frame of mind.
The seventy-something page story casts the middle-aged European as a lonely eccentric, although polite and innocuous in presentation. He sits on a park bench and observes young children at play. A woman of similar age, who we are later led to believe is one in possession of both dire looks and health, knits next to our familiar pederast. Our man soon realizes that she is the guardian of a comely twelve year-old girl.
Now, the title of the story afforded this reader a bit of confusion as I assumed the nymphet to be the enchanter as the man was so enchanted (if you will allow me such an easy literary flourish) by the young girl that he, following their premiere encounter, conspires to maneuver into the girl's life, to gain permission to her proximity. He accomplishes this by proposing to marry the sickly guardian of the child, our miserable knitter with a disgusting body, disagreeable odors, a host of health complications, and a wart that Nabokov cannot stop focusing our attention on.
The story after the proposal becomes a chess game for the enchanter (it would not be a Nabokov narrative if it did not employ the triumvirate of motifs that rule Nabokoviana: paedophilia, chess, and lepidoptera); "Don't think too much, keep the pressure on the weak corner of the board," he says to himself after the guardian announces her plans to return the child to the mother and stepfather in order to maintain silence in her home.
I don't mean for this review to become a Sparksnotes of the proceedings. Read it for yourself. It is a beautifully written account of a man's vile desire for and acts perpetrated upon a young girl. Nabokov has faced accusations of pederasty in past interviews for stories such as this one, and for those who condemn the artist based on a not-at-all penetrating glance on the subject matter--such as Lolita existing solely as a repressed paedophile's vicarious acts of abuse upon a young girl--perhaps Nabokov penned the ending of The Enchanter for you.
The penultimate scene describes our very own enchanter, overripe with desire, disgorging his reserves of "molten wax" which the child witnesses. The proceedings are costumed in esoteric metaphors, of course. Having awakened the guests and alerted the staff at their motel, our enchanter takes off to elude the chase of his would-be captors. When a friendly train arrives to satisfy our enchanter's final desire, Nabokov writes, "...this thundering iron thing, this instantaneous cinema of dismemberment....Zigzag gymnastics of lightning, spectrogram of a thunderbolt's split seconds-and the film of life had burst," reminding his readers that what they have witnessed was pure literary invention. The Enchanter was not an account of Lesley-Ann Downey, of Sarah Payne, or JonBenét Ramsey. It is a tale of fiction penned by an artist, no more and no less.
I say that half in jest.
There is an opinion pervasive among Nabokov's readers that The Enchanter is the precursor to Lolita, the "Ur-Lolita," an opinion that is not entirely false. Nabokov alludes to his darling story in the author's note that opens the book stating that it was "the first little throb of Lolita," thus inspiring readers to imply countless parallels between the story in question and Lolita. The idea that The Enchanter is a relative of Lolita's, however, is an alloy of indisputable fact whose quality is marred by the lesser metals of falsehood and dissimilarity. In other words, the nameless nymphet in The Enchanter finds identification with Lolita more by way of union in the rosy Haze of youth and less as a distant relative to young Dolores. A number of Nabokov's works contain at least a slight whisper of an adult male's repressed lust for a pre-pubescent girl, which lends itself to the idea that it is not uncommon for an author to develop and elaborate on themes across numerous novels. Dmitri Nabokov elaborates on this: "It may have contained, as he [Vladimir] put it, 'the first little throb' of the later novel--and even that thesis might be questioned if one attentively examines certain earlier works of his--but we must also not forget that the arts in general pulsate with first throbs that foreshadow future, larger works...."
With that said, let us move on to the story proper.
The story details the lecherous acts and repressed lust of a central European man of middle age who seems proper at first glance, although scenes wherein he indulges in subtle, stolen strokes across the lush valleys of wispish down on a young nymphet's arms disabuses us of this idea. Perhaps the most amusing characteristics of The Enchanter is the paedophile's conflict with his criminal desires, his very forbidden nature, against the more nurturing and paternal aspects of his character. In some capacity, he wishes he could feel a fatherly love for the Parisian child but, as expected, his erotic taste for young girls supplants his sense of shame as evidenced by mental images of tentacles enveloping the girl, a wolf in pursuit of his little Red Riding Hood, and the surreal visual anomaly of the "black salad devouring a green rabbit" which seems to capture the protagonist's (is he deserving of such a title?) disoriented frame of mind.
The seventy-something page story casts the middle-aged European as a lonely eccentric, although polite and innocuous in presentation. He sits on a park bench and observes young children at play. A woman of similar age, who we are later led to believe is one in possession of both dire looks and health, knits next to our familiar pederast. Our man soon realizes that she is the guardian of a comely twelve year-old girl.
Now, the title of the story afforded this reader a bit of confusion as I assumed the nymphet to be the enchanter as the man was so enchanted (if you will allow me such an easy literary flourish) by the young girl that he, following their premiere encounter, conspires to maneuver into the girl's life, to gain permission to her proximity. He accomplishes this by proposing to marry the sickly guardian of the child, our miserable knitter with a disgusting body, disagreeable odors, a host of health complications, and a wart that Nabokov cannot stop focusing our attention on.
The story after the proposal becomes a chess game for the enchanter (it would not be a Nabokov narrative if it did not employ the triumvirate of motifs that rule Nabokoviana: paedophilia, chess, and lepidoptera); "Don't think too much, keep the pressure on the weak corner of the board," he says to himself after the guardian announces her plans to return the child to the mother and stepfather in order to maintain silence in her home.
I don't mean for this review to become a Sparksnotes of the proceedings. Read it for yourself. It is a beautifully written account of a man's vile desire for and acts perpetrated upon a young girl. Nabokov has faced accusations of pederasty in past interviews for stories such as this one, and for those who condemn the artist based on a not-at-all penetrating glance on the subject matter--such as Lolita existing solely as a repressed paedophile's vicarious acts of abuse upon a young girl--perhaps Nabokov penned the ending of The Enchanter for you.
The penultimate scene describes our very own enchanter, overripe with desire, disgorging his reserves of "molten wax" which the child witnesses. The proceedings are costumed in esoteric metaphors, of course. Having awakened the guests and alerted the staff at their motel, our enchanter takes off to elude the chase of his would-be captors. When a friendly train arrives to satisfy our enchanter's final desire, Nabokov writes, "...this thundering iron thing, this instantaneous cinema of dismemberment....Zigzag gymnastics of lightning, spectrogram of a thunderbolt's split seconds-and the film of life had burst," reminding his readers that what they have witnessed was pure literary invention. The Enchanter was not an account of Lesley-Ann Downey, of Sarah Payne, or JonBenét Ramsey. It is a tale of fiction penned by an artist, no more and no less.
Identity by Milan Kundera
5.0
Identity opens with a dialogue between two women about a show, Lost to Sight, which discusses people who have vanished. They converse specifically about a local family that appeared on a recent episode who had all disappeared without a trace. This idea of being lost to sight strikes Chantal; in our world of cameras, of constant surveillance in which our portraits, fingerprints, information - our identities - is retained on file, how could one disappear entirely?
The story revolves around Chantal, who works in advertising while not falling in line with the corporate ethos - accomplished by wearing two faces - and Jean-Marc, who figures he is on the fringes of society, one step away from living life as a tramp (he describes a homeless man as his double). Chantal has left her ex-husband, a man of diminutive stature she called her “little mousie,” to be with Jean-Marc, a man who sought no information of her past life, wishing to remain ignorant of her identity as it excludes him.
When Chantal wanders the beach, surrounded by fathers, or, as she calls them, “daddies”; fathers without a father’s authority, men who go to the beach to play with their children, she laments that these daddies are so invested in their kites and beach-time activities that they do not notice her. She imagines herself approaching a father with two children strapped to his body and one at his side while flying a kite, whispering lewd things in his ear. “Leave me alone, I’m busy,” he would hiss.
“Men don’t turn to look at me anymore,” she complains to Jean-Marc, who wishes to say, What about me? Me who goes searching for you for kilometers on the beach, me who shouts your name in tears and who could chase after you the length and breadth of the planet?
To soothe Chantal’s injury, her absence of identity to other men, he pens her anonymous letters, signed CDB which we later learn stands for Cyrano de Bergerac who underwent a similar endeavor for a woman. This plan could not be successful without the author experiencing jealousy over his lover’s concealment of the letters, harboring them, keeping them safe from detection — “And if the woman keeps those letters secret, it is because she wants today’s discretion to protect tomorrow’s adventure.”
Chantal puts on her red beads and her red shawl which her admirer is so fond of. The beads she only wears on special occasions, yet she dons them so easily for another man. When she passes the first man she suspects if the author, she blushes down to her chest after not having blushed for years, after having forgotten how to blush. Before she and Jean-Marc make love, she acts dismissive, making Jean-Marc give chase to her around their home, pursuing her as if she were new prey and, while they make love, she imagines a third party seated to the side, watching them.
The tension mounts when Chantal’s step-sister visits without notice. Her three young children are at play in Chantal’s bedroom and when she looks into her room she sees her brassieres, her underwear and - what else? - her letters scattered about the floor. She kicks her step-sister and her children out without ceremony. With the letters revealed, Chantal escalates the situation by announcing that she is leaving for London, where Jean-Marc, under the guise of CDB, has announced that he is departing to. She means to force him to stop her from traveling by admitting that he is the author of the letters, an admission he does not make. Following her departure, he catches a taxi and seeks to confront her at the Gare du Nord before she boards the train to London. Thinking it unwise not to call her bluff, he boards the London-bound train in the hopes that she would be aboard it as well. She is found in the first-class compartment along with her colleagues who are, by some miracle, attending a business trip to London.
Jean-Marc, having finally located her, is wounded to see that Chantal is in high spirits and is animated in a way she has not been with him. After arriving in London and departing the train, Jean-Marc means to pursue her, an impossibility after being apprehended by an officer for attempting to push through a crowd in the midst of a spectacle involving children in helmets being filmed. Before he loses sight of her, he notices Chantal in a phone booth, realizing later that she was likely telephoning a former lover he had nicknamed Britannicus, who, after his acquaintance with Chantal, she finds out is a renowned orgiast. He then loses sight of her before the crowd clears.
With only enough money for a return trip, Jean-Marc awaits Chantal’s return at the train platform. Across the street is a building in which, by some stroke of unexplained intuition, Jean-Marc suspect Chantal is in, engaging in an orgy. Chantal, stripped of her clothes, seeks to escape the orgy and find her way to the landing to retrieve her clothes and make her exit, but the complex is a labyrinth, with the rooms leading to dead-ends and the doors in the process of being nailed shut. Chantal means to escape through an open window, the same one Jean-Marc stands outside of and looking into through the upraised curtain. Jean-Marc shouts her name and she wakes up from a dream.
Yes, it was a dream, but how much of Identity has been dreamed? What happenings can the reader assert as fact without any doubt? Perhaps none, for Identity is merely fiction and, as fiction, we can be sure that nothing has truly transpired. Kundera treats the finale of the book with the same lightness of style that we have become accustomed to in nearly all of his fictional works, which are often as farcical and fantastic as they are earnest. Kundera believes he is an author without a message. As such, he means to jerk us awake from our reading of Identity, from the dream wherein we imagine that there is a moral or message to be freed from the book. We are thus awakened from the dream of fiction into reality, where everything was as it was before our beginning the book.
The story revolves around Chantal, who works in advertising while not falling in line with the corporate ethos - accomplished by wearing two faces - and Jean-Marc, who figures he is on the fringes of society, one step away from living life as a tramp (he describes a homeless man as his double). Chantal has left her ex-husband, a man of diminutive stature she called her “little mousie,” to be with Jean-Marc, a man who sought no information of her past life, wishing to remain ignorant of her identity as it excludes him.
When Chantal wanders the beach, surrounded by fathers, or, as she calls them, “daddies”; fathers without a father’s authority, men who go to the beach to play with their children, she laments that these daddies are so invested in their kites and beach-time activities that they do not notice her. She imagines herself approaching a father with two children strapped to his body and one at his side while flying a kite, whispering lewd things in his ear. “Leave me alone, I’m busy,” he would hiss.
“Men don’t turn to look at me anymore,” she complains to Jean-Marc, who wishes to say, What about me? Me who goes searching for you for kilometers on the beach, me who shouts your name in tears and who could chase after you the length and breadth of the planet?
To soothe Chantal’s injury, her absence of identity to other men, he pens her anonymous letters, signed CDB which we later learn stands for Cyrano de Bergerac who underwent a similar endeavor for a woman. This plan could not be successful without the author experiencing jealousy over his lover’s concealment of the letters, harboring them, keeping them safe from detection — “And if the woman keeps those letters secret, it is because she wants today’s discretion to protect tomorrow’s adventure.”
Chantal puts on her red beads and her red shawl which her admirer is so fond of. The beads she only wears on special occasions, yet she dons them so easily for another man. When she passes the first man she suspects if the author, she blushes down to her chest after not having blushed for years, after having forgotten how to blush. Before she and Jean-Marc make love, she acts dismissive, making Jean-Marc give chase to her around their home, pursuing her as if she were new prey and, while they make love, she imagines a third party seated to the side, watching them.
The tension mounts when Chantal’s step-sister visits without notice. Her three young children are at play in Chantal’s bedroom and when she looks into her room she sees her brassieres, her underwear and - what else? - her letters scattered about the floor. She kicks her step-sister and her children out without ceremony. With the letters revealed, Chantal escalates the situation by announcing that she is leaving for London, where Jean-Marc, under the guise of CDB, has announced that he is departing to. She means to force him to stop her from traveling by admitting that he is the author of the letters, an admission he does not make. Following her departure, he catches a taxi and seeks to confront her at the Gare du Nord before she boards the train to London. Thinking it unwise not to call her bluff, he boards the London-bound train in the hopes that she would be aboard it as well. She is found in the first-class compartment along with her colleagues who are, by some miracle, attending a business trip to London.
Jean-Marc, having finally located her, is wounded to see that Chantal is in high spirits and is animated in a way she has not been with him. After arriving in London and departing the train, Jean-Marc means to pursue her, an impossibility after being apprehended by an officer for attempting to push through a crowd in the midst of a spectacle involving children in helmets being filmed. Before he loses sight of her, he notices Chantal in a phone booth, realizing later that she was likely telephoning a former lover he had nicknamed Britannicus, who, after his acquaintance with Chantal, she finds out is a renowned orgiast. He then loses sight of her before the crowd clears.
With only enough money for a return trip, Jean-Marc awaits Chantal’s return at the train platform. Across the street is a building in which, by some stroke of unexplained intuition, Jean-Marc suspect Chantal is in, engaging in an orgy. Chantal, stripped of her clothes, seeks to escape the orgy and find her way to the landing to retrieve her clothes and make her exit, but the complex is a labyrinth, with the rooms leading to dead-ends and the doors in the process of being nailed shut. Chantal means to escape through an open window, the same one Jean-Marc stands outside of and looking into through the upraised curtain. Jean-Marc shouts her name and she wakes up from a dream.
Yes, it was a dream, but how much of Identity has been dreamed? What happenings can the reader assert as fact without any doubt? Perhaps none, for Identity is merely fiction and, as fiction, we can be sure that nothing has truly transpired. Kundera treats the finale of the book with the same lightness of style that we have become accustomed to in nearly all of his fictional works, which are often as farcical and fantastic as they are earnest. Kundera believes he is an author without a message. As such, he means to jerk us awake from our reading of Identity, from the dream wherein we imagine that there is a moral or message to be freed from the book. We are thus awakened from the dream of fiction into reality, where everything was as it was before our beginning the book.
Encounter by Milan Kundera
4.0
Encounter, a collection of essays, offers an illuminating and historicist perspective to a myriad of topics such as the brutal gestures of the “rapist hand” of Francis Bacon which endeavors to discover the buried self; a novel perspective on humor, or “The Comical Absence of the Comical,” in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Gabriel Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as representative of the arch-novel; a meditation on the blacklist as inspired by Kundera’s lover for the blacklisted Anatole France; numerous tributes to Rabelais, Bach, Louis Aragon, Oscar Milosz, Schoenberg, and of course Kundera’s precious composer, Leoš Janáček.
He writes of life in exile; the liberation of exile, as explained by fellow Czech writer Vera Linhortova; the lives of fellow émigrés; the Prague Spring of 1968 and its coincidental historical nearness to the French May of the same year; etc. Inspired by his upbringing at the hand of his pianist father, Kundera writes extensively of Bach’s fugues, Schoenberg’s legacy (the forgetting of Schoenberg as well; our fight to ensure that the Nazi murderers may never be forgotten at the expense of our memory of Schoenberg), Janáček’s “antiromantic expression,” Stravinsky’s ouvre. Numerous poets and novelists also find their place within Encounter. Even the medium of film is examined by Kundera’s critical prose.
Approaching the subject from the angle of the celebration of 100 years of film, he states that “the new technology has become, primo, the principal agent of stupidity (incomparably more powerful than the bad literature of old),” and laments the generation that has forgotten Frederico Fellini. Fellini, who Kundera believes has achieved through film the greatest aspiration of Surrealism by incorporating the dream into reality, had, in his later period, argued with the media magnate Silvio Berlusconi over his “allowing televised films to be interrupted by advertising” — “A confrontatiion between two different legacies from the brothers Lumière (history’s first filmmakers): between film as art and film as agent of stupidity. We know the outcome: film as art has lost.”
Encounter is as tragic as it is triumphant. In it art the artist’s laments over a generation that has reached the border of all art, of all music, of all life. Many ideologies, mediums, movements, etc. see their demise before them, if it has not been delivered already. We are living in the age of forgetting, of loss. Indeed, we have forgotten about Schoenberg, about Fellini, we gravely misunderstand Janáček. Additionally, we are forgetting about the novel as an art form.
As is the case with Calvino’s Why Read the Classics? And the author’s own Testaments Betrayed, one would be best off establishing a firsthand familiarity with the artists, composers, and other figures Kundera explores before returning to this work. It is, even with only a cursory or non-existent knowledge of most of Kundera’s subjects, an enlightening and penetrating read.
He writes of life in exile; the liberation of exile, as explained by fellow Czech writer Vera Linhortova; the lives of fellow émigrés; the Prague Spring of 1968 and its coincidental historical nearness to the French May of the same year; etc. Inspired by his upbringing at the hand of his pianist father, Kundera writes extensively of Bach’s fugues, Schoenberg’s legacy (the forgetting of Schoenberg as well; our fight to ensure that the Nazi murderers may never be forgotten at the expense of our memory of Schoenberg), Janáček’s “antiromantic expression,” Stravinsky’s ouvre. Numerous poets and novelists also find their place within Encounter. Even the medium of film is examined by Kundera’s critical prose.
Approaching the subject from the angle of the celebration of 100 years of film, he states that “the new technology has become, primo, the principal agent of stupidity (incomparably more powerful than the bad literature of old),” and laments the generation that has forgotten Frederico Fellini. Fellini, who Kundera believes has achieved through film the greatest aspiration of Surrealism by incorporating the dream into reality, had, in his later period, argued with the media magnate Silvio Berlusconi over his “allowing televised films to be interrupted by advertising” — “A confrontatiion between two different legacies from the brothers Lumière (history’s first filmmakers): between film as art and film as agent of stupidity. We know the outcome: film as art has lost.”
Encounter is as tragic as it is triumphant. In it art the artist’s laments over a generation that has reached the border of all art, of all music, of all life. Many ideologies, mediums, movements, etc. see their demise before them, if it has not been delivered already. We are living in the age of forgetting, of loss. Indeed, we have forgotten about Schoenberg, about Fellini, we gravely misunderstand Janáček. Additionally, we are forgetting about the novel as an art form.
As is the case with Calvino’s Why Read the Classics? And the author’s own Testaments Betrayed, one would be best off establishing a firsthand familiarity with the artists, composers, and other figures Kundera explores before returning to this work. It is, even with only a cursory or non-existent knowledge of most of Kundera’s subjects, an enlightening and penetrating read.
Farewell Waltz by Milan Kundera
The final line of dialogue in The Farewell Waltz comes courtesy of Bertlef, an American, after he has adopted a middle-aged doctor to be his son. His wife, having arrived via train only moments later says she does not understand what is happening. Bertlef: "I shall explain everything to you. We have many things to talk about today, many things to celebrate. We have a marvelous weekend before us." But has a death not occurred that very day? Indeed, the woman Bertlef had made love to the night prior has recently expired. Why, then, his cheery disposition? The answer, which Kundera painstakingly details, is that life is not so simple as we would think; poles of black and white with seemingly infinite shades of gray, and, in The Farewell Waltz, of blinding, magnificent blue. In this novel, Kundera’s expert hand effortlessly weaves a myriad of narratives which, in most of Kundera’s works, inevitably, and tragically, converge in on one another. With his fiction he shows his readers that the intricate interplay of seemingly negligible, subtle and minute circumstances have the capability to result in a drastic shift in how we see and experience the world, as well as influence our thoughts and perceptions. No seeming certainty asserts an invulnerability to revision.
Klima is a famous trumpeter with a reputation that precedes the instrumentalist. During a practice one night, he receives a call from a former lover, Ruzena, who works at a distant European spa that treats women for infertility. She announces to Klima that she is pregnant with his child. Klima does not receive this news well, and argues that the child could not be his. He is, in fact, a married man, and Ruzena was a one-night stand.
Tomorrow is his wife’s birthday, and, unfortunately, he must abandon her to rectify the awful predicament he’s been coerced into. He buys her flowers and surprises her with movie tickets. “Won’t you be here tomorrow?” she asks. He explains to her that he has been ordered to play a concert on behalf of a youth league. His wife doesn’t believe him, but she has accepted the fact that her husband’s passions belong to other women.
When he meets up with an American, Bertelf, a charming, aged Christian with an unconquerable sense of well-being who had introduced him to Ruzena, he tells a similar tale of a woman whom many men had made love to except for him. When he finally made love to her once, she told him that she was pregnant. He welcomed the news and said he planned to marry her. Not expecting him to accept such a circumstance with enthusiasm, she confessed that she had lied. He suggests to Klima that he not feign affection for Ruzena but that he actually learn to love her. Later, they visit the doctor Skreta who eventually reveals that he tested the woman’s urine and that she is, in fact, pregnant. He suggests that Klima, with Skreta on drums and a pharmacist on piano, play in town so that Klima can accompany Ruzena to the board meeting where the committee will decide whether or not they will grant the abortion.
Klima phones Ruzena, adopting his sentimental act, and agrees to meet her at a brasserie to discuss the matter. When they do so, Klima accounts for his two months of silence, explaining that he had been the victim of ingratitudes and had lost everyone dear to him. He was all alone and did not want to talk to anyone for fear of what he might say or how he might act. Ruzena believes him. She says that she was planning on having the child even if he had not responded to her phone calls and letters, a revelation which disarms Klima. Abandoning his earlier sentiments, he tells her it’s a couple’s business, not just the woman’s, but she insists that she will have it. Klima has no kids, saying to himself that he did not want to exhaust his wife by having her raise a child; this he also tells to the girl. She suspects his wife is infertile and remarks that she is overjoyed to be able to give him a child. Realizing he is at a dead-end, he orders two brandies and makes a shoddy toast to the future family.
When the couple are leaving, a group of men in black numbering ten are outside and he believes he sees one smiling at him. They are driving and eventually see a light in their rearview. One of the men has been following them. They stop and the man comes up, saying he needs to talk to Ruzena. Klima says she’s with him, but the stranger says he needs to talk to him, too. Klima speeds off and eventually eludes him, and Ruzena explains that he has been regularly stalking her.
When Klima goes to visit Bertlef, he doesn’t answer the door. Klima presses the doorknob and sees that the room is open. Within his room he can see a radiant blue light on the wall and wonders if Bertlef is making love or bathing in the light. Bertlef then comes out of his room and is happy to see Klima, invites him in. The room, by some odd quirk of perception, becomes lit by an ordinary lamp. When he brings up the blue light, Bertlef is confused and says the stress must have him hallucinating.
We then meet Jakub, who plans to emigrate. He has a blue tablet Dr. Skreta produced some fifteen years ago when he was in the military which he shows Olga, a female friend of his for whom he feels no intimate passion. He says to her that it should be a rite of passage to receive such a tablet, to have one be in control of the time in which they die and so live responsibly and with purpose. Jakub and Ruzena are familiar only as neighbors. When a team of dog catchers attempt to abduct a dog he is watching, Ruzena attempts to prevent him from escaping apprehension.
Later at the spa, the strange man from last night comes up to Ruzena and asks forgiveness for causing a scene. He appears to be her scorned admirer, possibly lover. She says she has nothing going on between Klima and her, but she refuses to “lower herself” by swearing to such a petty thing. We begin to wonder if he is not a scorned lover and, if so, if the baby is actually his. At Bertlef’s house, Jakub, in Dr. Skreta’s company, looks upon a pious painting the American had made and asks why the halo in the painting of his patron saint is blue. Bertlef describes the artistic history of the halo and how it has changed color over time but was originally blue. This raises a number of questions: Has Klima seen an angel the night before in Bertlef’s house? Is this foreshadowing some awful future circumstance involving the blue poison tablet?
Bertlef speaks of King Herod who, after hearing of the future King of all Jews, ordered all babies to be murdered. He viewed it as his gift to the world that he sought to rid the world of mankind. Jakub relates to this view. Skreta later relates to Jakub his insemination of his patients with his own sperm as his gift to the world to contrast King Herod’s idea of his gift to the world. Dr. Skreta’s gift to the world is to bolster the country’s population with his sons and daughters.
Kalima takes an exhausting journey via train to where Klima is set to perform and is happy to see a poster advertising the concert when she steps off as she doubted that Klima was actually performing. However, this joy is soon defeated by the realization that this fact does not disprove his infidelity. Later she runs into a film crew she knew years back who celebrate their reunion and denounce her husband for having kept her caged. Ruzena, with some time remaining before the concert, steps into a filthy bar and runs into the same film crew with whom she is familiar as they had earlier been shooting a feature at her spa. She unwittingly shakes hands with Klima's wife.
Jakub is spending his final day before he plans to emigrate talking with Olga. They are in the same brasserie as Klima and Ruzena, although Jakub knows only Ruzena. When the pair leaves, he notices that she left her tube of tranquilizers on her table. Inspecting the contents, he is amused to see that the pills seem nearly identical to the blue poison pill Dr. Skreta had given him. He places the poison within the tube and marvels at their similarity. Just then, Ruzena returns to claim her tube. He attempts to hold her back but she insists he return it. Without refusing or attempting to explain, he lets her leave with it. He then becomes obsessed by the thought that she will eventually die by means of taking the poison. He keeps thinking that it is not too late to chase after her and explain, but he does not know how he would explain his need to suddenly depart to Olga and so remains seated. Throughout the rest of the story he makes multiple attempts to contact or run into Ruzena and explain, each time unsuccessful.
At the concert, Ruzena and Kalima are seated near each other with the rest of the film crew. One of the men has his arm around Ruzena and is fondling her breast. Meanwhile, two other men's legs are touching Kalima's, and this indiscretion bestows upon her a sense of adventure. Kalima, choosing not to cross the intimate border or remain on the dull side of it, opts instead to remain in the middle of it, and lets her leg linger against theirs.
Later, Ruzena realizes the woman is Klima's wife and insists the man stop touching her. She is embarrassed to have been pawed so shamelessly in front of her rival. Bertlef arrives shortly thereafter and takes a seat next to Ruzena and conquers the lecherous men, who are harassing Ruzena for her prudishness, with his lighthearted wit. During the performance Bertlef eventually leaves with Ruzena back to his apartment. Bertlef taking Ruzena away allowed Klima to associate with his wife after the concert without fear of discovery, although he nearly panics at her absence, wondering if she had gone back on their agreement to have the abortion. Husband and wife ultimately end up at Dr. Skreta's, which he had lent to Klima for the night, and attempt to make love, although he cannot maintain an erection. This, as with every other minute detail, Kalima interprets as his love for another woman. Their night ends.
Olga and Jakub make love in the neighboring room. Olga is curious as to why they had never so much as kissed, not knowing Jakub has no feelings for her as anything but a female acquaintance. He feels sorry for her since her father, who had denounced Jakub as an enemy of the state and condemned him to death, had been imprisoned and executed, and so makes love to her out of a sense of duty, of compassion, although he remains obsessed with Ruzena's inevitable demise all the while. When he telephones the spa later, he is relieved to know that, while she can't come to the phone, she is alive, which tells him that the pill was not really poison, although he does not entertain the possibility that pure chance had happened in her favor, making her retrieve her usual pills instead of the poison.
The following morning, 5:30 am, Klima goes to Ruzena's home, with Frantisek on his trail who had been pacing back and forth outside all night, worrying over Ruzena’s whereabouts, and knocks on her door. When she does not answer he goes to the spa and waits for her. When she comes in, he begs her to reconsider the abortion. She tells him she has reconsiders, and explains to her co-worker that Klima is no longer a factor in her decision. She says she has fallen in love. Bertlef, despite his graying and balding hair, had pleased her more than anybody else in her life. She meets Klima at the clinic at 9 am. Dr. Skreta, acting the part for the board, lectures the couple on the implications of their abortion. Finally, it is approved. Frantisek has stalked her into the clinic after asking about her whereabouts at the spa, and follows her back to the thermal house when she exits the clinic. He is convinced the child is his — and likely is — and Ruzena insists that she will not listen to him and insists he leaves, especially since he is in a woman’s only area of the spa. He doesn't, saying if she kills his baby then he'll kill himself, too. A naked woman walks over to retrieve a towel and is puzzled at the sight of this man. To calm herself down Ruzena takes a pill and immediately doubles over and dies almost immediately. This spectacle creates an absurd procession of nude women hurrying to the scene to witness death in a familiar face, with hysterical Frantisek sobbing over her body. It is amusing to note that Farewell Waltz’s most comic moment occurs at the time of Ruzena’s, and, by extension, her child’s, death.
Meanwhile, Jakub is driving to the border. He contemplates his high-mindedness which he believes accounts for his distaste for other people, the reason why, as Kundera writes, he willingly gives them poison. He is confronted by the metaphysical thought that he is a murderer. He was assured that she was still alive, yet he had left the poison in the tube while convinced it was poison, therefore making him no greater than a murderer. Pondering the situation as though it had happened (for, according to Jakub, to whom the news of her death has not reached, it has not happened -- Ruzena is still alive and well in his world), he decides that he feels no sympathy for the metaphysical murder. He proceeds toward the border liberated and happy to finally leave the country, although he is leaving the only hometown he ever had, wherein he had not ever allowed himself to attempt to love another. Before he leaves he notices the penultimate child whose facial features, like numerous others he’s seen, resembles the eccentric doctor’s; the ultimate being Bertlef’s son, who resembles the doctor down to the birthmark above his lip.
Back at the scene of the death, Frantisek insists that he murdered her and that he be arrested, but the cause of death is undetermined. When Klima asks Dr. Skreta to watch after Ruzena before her operation, he announces in a very lighthearted manner that she won't worry at all since she is no longer alive. Klima repeatedly bows and shakes Skreta's hand before leaving. He returns to his wife and kisses her insistently and says he is so lucky to have her. When they are driving back home, Klima smiles sincerely as he caresses her shoulder, although this does nothing for her. She is neither suspicious nor moved. When she was leaving the neighboring room in which he made love to Olga, Jakub happened to run into Kalima. Seeing her for the first time and free of reservation owing to his nearing departure, he announces that he is leaving the country but now wishes he could stay not because he is starting to become fond of the country at the last minute, but because he had always turned away from beauty, and that Kalima is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. She laments over that missed opportunity, leading to a loss of love for Klima. She, being no longer concerned as she is about his affairs, sees in their future their inevitable breakup, and this does not move her.
A moral reading of this novel will lead us unto numerous questions and protestations; who does nobody bother over Ruzena’s death, save for her scorned lover for whom she had no feelings for? Each character merely offers their surprise over the happening as though they had merely read of it in the news. Following the scene in which Frantisek demands to be arrested, we know not of what happened to him. He promised Ruzena that if she took the baby's life that he would then take his own. Now, what will he do now that both mother and child are gone? Perhaps the pathetic clinger has go on to kill himself as well.
Olga remembers Jakub showing her his poison tablet, and she brings this detail to Dr. Skreta’s attention once the inspector leaves, but Dr. Skreta denies that he gave him such a thing. She knows she will never inform on him. But yet her thoughts are devoted to the murdered, not to whom has been murdered. Bertlef remarked, while explaining his evidence to the inspector for freeing her from the charge that it was a suicide, that she was boxed into her dreadful life, with a hanger-on who loved her whom she did not love, and a man she admired who did not love her. The baby was only her ploy to bind Klima to her. She had nothing else.
Following her death, there is a sense of liberation and celebration all around. Klima has been freed from fate’s torment. Kalima had been given a taste of what she saw in Jakub as "a real man,” and given a sense of adventure and a taste of infidelity through the film crew's subtle embraces. She seems to no longer love nor worry over her husband and his affairs. Jakub is free to emigrate as he had always dreamed of, witnessing before his departure the enlightening marvel of unrivaled beauty in Kalima. Dr. Skreta was adopted by Bertlef and thus given American citizenship and the liberty to travel more freely, and both of their wives arrived on the same train. Olga was freed from her sorrow and her feelings for Jakub. Nobody mourned. Everybody celebrated.
When we read a novel, we expect that all the questions we have asked throughout the course of our reading will be answered on or before its conclusion. Kundera confronts us with the truth that even the novel, the divine historic record of human experience, is unable to explain all of life’s mysteries. What of that blue light both Klima and Ruzena saw in Bertlef’s apartment? Was its radiant glimmer meant to foreshadow Ruzena’s forthcoming encounter with that divine overwhelming light of the afterlife, a mysterious shining from the blue halo she would soon wear in death? What of Frantisek? Has he gone on to take his own life? What course does Kalima’s relationship with her husband navigate following her disenchantment by the elegant words of Jakub? Will Jakub ever learn that he is, in fact, responsible for Ruzena’s death, that the pill was indeed poison? Is Dr. Skreta really inseminating his every patient with his own sperm, and are the children who resemble the doctor really his? We must humble ourselves and become reconciled to the tragic fact that a great deal of our questions, whether it regard this novel or life as we know it, will remain, until the end, unanswered.
4.0
The final line of dialogue in The Farewell Waltz comes courtesy of Bertlef, an American, after he has adopted a middle-aged doctor to be his son. His wife, having arrived via train only moments later says she does not understand what is happening. Bertlef: "I shall explain everything to you. We have many things to talk about today, many things to celebrate. We have a marvelous weekend before us." But has a death not occurred that very day? Indeed, the woman Bertlef had made love to the night prior has recently expired. Why, then, his cheery disposition? The answer, which Kundera painstakingly details, is that life is not so simple as we would think; poles of black and white with seemingly infinite shades of gray, and, in The Farewell Waltz, of blinding, magnificent blue. In this novel, Kundera’s expert hand effortlessly weaves a myriad of narratives which, in most of Kundera’s works, inevitably, and tragically, converge in on one another. With his fiction he shows his readers that the intricate interplay of seemingly negligible, subtle and minute circumstances have the capability to result in a drastic shift in how we see and experience the world, as well as influence our thoughts and perceptions. No seeming certainty asserts an invulnerability to revision.
Klima is a famous trumpeter with a reputation that precedes the instrumentalist. During a practice one night, he receives a call from a former lover, Ruzena, who works at a distant European spa that treats women for infertility. She announces to Klima that she is pregnant with his child. Klima does not receive this news well, and argues that the child could not be his. He is, in fact, a married man, and Ruzena was a one-night stand.
Tomorrow is his wife’s birthday, and, unfortunately, he must abandon her to rectify the awful predicament he’s been coerced into. He buys her flowers and surprises her with movie tickets. “Won’t you be here tomorrow?” she asks. He explains to her that he has been ordered to play a concert on behalf of a youth league. His wife doesn’t believe him, but she has accepted the fact that her husband’s passions belong to other women.
When he meets up with an American, Bertelf, a charming, aged Christian with an unconquerable sense of well-being who had introduced him to Ruzena, he tells a similar tale of a woman whom many men had made love to except for him. When he finally made love to her once, she told him that she was pregnant. He welcomed the news and said he planned to marry her. Not expecting him to accept such a circumstance with enthusiasm, she confessed that she had lied. He suggests to Klima that he not feign affection for Ruzena but that he actually learn to love her. Later, they visit the doctor Skreta who eventually reveals that he tested the woman’s urine and that she is, in fact, pregnant. He suggests that Klima, with Skreta on drums and a pharmacist on piano, play in town so that Klima can accompany Ruzena to the board meeting where the committee will decide whether or not they will grant the abortion.
Klima phones Ruzena, adopting his sentimental act, and agrees to meet her at a brasserie to discuss the matter. When they do so, Klima accounts for his two months of silence, explaining that he had been the victim of ingratitudes and had lost everyone dear to him. He was all alone and did not want to talk to anyone for fear of what he might say or how he might act. Ruzena believes him. She says that she was planning on having the child even if he had not responded to her phone calls and letters, a revelation which disarms Klima. Abandoning his earlier sentiments, he tells her it’s a couple’s business, not just the woman’s, but she insists that she will have it. Klima has no kids, saying to himself that he did not want to exhaust his wife by having her raise a child; this he also tells to the girl. She suspects his wife is infertile and remarks that she is overjoyed to be able to give him a child. Realizing he is at a dead-end, he orders two brandies and makes a shoddy toast to the future family.
When the couple are leaving, a group of men in black numbering ten are outside and he believes he sees one smiling at him. They are driving and eventually see a light in their rearview. One of the men has been following them. They stop and the man comes up, saying he needs to talk to Ruzena. Klima says she’s with him, but the stranger says he needs to talk to him, too. Klima speeds off and eventually eludes him, and Ruzena explains that he has been regularly stalking her.
When Klima goes to visit Bertlef, he doesn’t answer the door. Klima presses the doorknob and sees that the room is open. Within his room he can see a radiant blue light on the wall and wonders if Bertlef is making love or bathing in the light. Bertlef then comes out of his room and is happy to see Klima, invites him in. The room, by some odd quirk of perception, becomes lit by an ordinary lamp. When he brings up the blue light, Bertlef is confused and says the stress must have him hallucinating.
We then meet Jakub, who plans to emigrate. He has a blue tablet Dr. Skreta produced some fifteen years ago when he was in the military which he shows Olga, a female friend of his for whom he feels no intimate passion. He says to her that it should be a rite of passage to receive such a tablet, to have one be in control of the time in which they die and so live responsibly and with purpose. Jakub and Ruzena are familiar only as neighbors. When a team of dog catchers attempt to abduct a dog he is watching, Ruzena attempts to prevent him from escaping apprehension.
Later at the spa, the strange man from last night comes up to Ruzena and asks forgiveness for causing a scene. He appears to be her scorned admirer, possibly lover. She says she has nothing going on between Klima and her, but she refuses to “lower herself” by swearing to such a petty thing. We begin to wonder if he is not a scorned lover and, if so, if the baby is actually his. At Bertlef’s house, Jakub, in Dr. Skreta’s company, looks upon a pious painting the American had made and asks why the halo in the painting of his patron saint is blue. Bertlef describes the artistic history of the halo and how it has changed color over time but was originally blue. This raises a number of questions: Has Klima seen an angel the night before in Bertlef’s house? Is this foreshadowing some awful future circumstance involving the blue poison tablet?
Bertlef speaks of King Herod who, after hearing of the future King of all Jews, ordered all babies to be murdered. He viewed it as his gift to the world that he sought to rid the world of mankind. Jakub relates to this view. Skreta later relates to Jakub his insemination of his patients with his own sperm as his gift to the world to contrast King Herod’s idea of his gift to the world. Dr. Skreta’s gift to the world is to bolster the country’s population with his sons and daughters.
Kalima takes an exhausting journey via train to where Klima is set to perform and is happy to see a poster advertising the concert when she steps off as she doubted that Klima was actually performing. However, this joy is soon defeated by the realization that this fact does not disprove his infidelity. Later she runs into a film crew she knew years back who celebrate their reunion and denounce her husband for having kept her caged. Ruzena, with some time remaining before the concert, steps into a filthy bar and runs into the same film crew with whom she is familiar as they had earlier been shooting a feature at her spa. She unwittingly shakes hands with Klima's wife.
Jakub is spending his final day before he plans to emigrate talking with Olga. They are in the same brasserie as Klima and Ruzena, although Jakub knows only Ruzena. When the pair leaves, he notices that she left her tube of tranquilizers on her table. Inspecting the contents, he is amused to see that the pills seem nearly identical to the blue poison pill Dr. Skreta had given him. He places the poison within the tube and marvels at their similarity. Just then, Ruzena returns to claim her tube. He attempts to hold her back but she insists he return it. Without refusing or attempting to explain, he lets her leave with it. He then becomes obsessed by the thought that she will eventually die by means of taking the poison. He keeps thinking that it is not too late to chase after her and explain, but he does not know how he would explain his need to suddenly depart to Olga and so remains seated. Throughout the rest of the story he makes multiple attempts to contact or run into Ruzena and explain, each time unsuccessful.
At the concert, Ruzena and Kalima are seated near each other with the rest of the film crew. One of the men has his arm around Ruzena and is fondling her breast. Meanwhile, two other men's legs are touching Kalima's, and this indiscretion bestows upon her a sense of adventure. Kalima, choosing not to cross the intimate border or remain on the dull side of it, opts instead to remain in the middle of it, and lets her leg linger against theirs.
Later, Ruzena realizes the woman is Klima's wife and insists the man stop touching her. She is embarrassed to have been pawed so shamelessly in front of her rival. Bertlef arrives shortly thereafter and takes a seat next to Ruzena and conquers the lecherous men, who are harassing Ruzena for her prudishness, with his lighthearted wit. During the performance Bertlef eventually leaves with Ruzena back to his apartment. Bertlef taking Ruzena away allowed Klima to associate with his wife after the concert without fear of discovery, although he nearly panics at her absence, wondering if she had gone back on their agreement to have the abortion. Husband and wife ultimately end up at Dr. Skreta's, which he had lent to Klima for the night, and attempt to make love, although he cannot maintain an erection. This, as with every other minute detail, Kalima interprets as his love for another woman. Their night ends.
Olga and Jakub make love in the neighboring room. Olga is curious as to why they had never so much as kissed, not knowing Jakub has no feelings for her as anything but a female acquaintance. He feels sorry for her since her father, who had denounced Jakub as an enemy of the state and condemned him to death, had been imprisoned and executed, and so makes love to her out of a sense of duty, of compassion, although he remains obsessed with Ruzena's inevitable demise all the while. When he telephones the spa later, he is relieved to know that, while she can't come to the phone, she is alive, which tells him that the pill was not really poison, although he does not entertain the possibility that pure chance had happened in her favor, making her retrieve her usual pills instead of the poison.
The following morning, 5:30 am, Klima goes to Ruzena's home, with Frantisek on his trail who had been pacing back and forth outside all night, worrying over Ruzena’s whereabouts, and knocks on her door. When she does not answer he goes to the spa and waits for her. When she comes in, he begs her to reconsider the abortion. She tells him she has reconsiders, and explains to her co-worker that Klima is no longer a factor in her decision. She says she has fallen in love. Bertlef, despite his graying and balding hair, had pleased her more than anybody else in her life. She meets Klima at the clinic at 9 am. Dr. Skreta, acting the part for the board, lectures the couple on the implications of their abortion. Finally, it is approved. Frantisek has stalked her into the clinic after asking about her whereabouts at the spa, and follows her back to the thermal house when she exits the clinic. He is convinced the child is his — and likely is — and Ruzena insists that she will not listen to him and insists he leaves, especially since he is in a woman’s only area of the spa. He doesn't, saying if she kills his baby then he'll kill himself, too. A naked woman walks over to retrieve a towel and is puzzled at the sight of this man. To calm herself down Ruzena takes a pill and immediately doubles over and dies almost immediately. This spectacle creates an absurd procession of nude women hurrying to the scene to witness death in a familiar face, with hysterical Frantisek sobbing over her body. It is amusing to note that Farewell Waltz’s most comic moment occurs at the time of Ruzena’s, and, by extension, her child’s, death.
Meanwhile, Jakub is driving to the border. He contemplates his high-mindedness which he believes accounts for his distaste for other people, the reason why, as Kundera writes, he willingly gives them poison. He is confronted by the metaphysical thought that he is a murderer. He was assured that she was still alive, yet he had left the poison in the tube while convinced it was poison, therefore making him no greater than a murderer. Pondering the situation as though it had happened (for, according to Jakub, to whom the news of her death has not reached, it has not happened -- Ruzena is still alive and well in his world), he decides that he feels no sympathy for the metaphysical murder. He proceeds toward the border liberated and happy to finally leave the country, although he is leaving the only hometown he ever had, wherein he had not ever allowed himself to attempt to love another. Before he leaves he notices the penultimate child whose facial features, like numerous others he’s seen, resembles the eccentric doctor’s; the ultimate being Bertlef’s son, who resembles the doctor down to the birthmark above his lip.
Back at the scene of the death, Frantisek insists that he murdered her and that he be arrested, but the cause of death is undetermined. When Klima asks Dr. Skreta to watch after Ruzena before her operation, he announces in a very lighthearted manner that she won't worry at all since she is no longer alive. Klima repeatedly bows and shakes Skreta's hand before leaving. He returns to his wife and kisses her insistently and says he is so lucky to have her. When they are driving back home, Klima smiles sincerely as he caresses her shoulder, although this does nothing for her. She is neither suspicious nor moved. When she was leaving the neighboring room in which he made love to Olga, Jakub happened to run into Kalima. Seeing her for the first time and free of reservation owing to his nearing departure, he announces that he is leaving the country but now wishes he could stay not because he is starting to become fond of the country at the last minute, but because he had always turned away from beauty, and that Kalima is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. She laments over that missed opportunity, leading to a loss of love for Klima. She, being no longer concerned as she is about his affairs, sees in their future their inevitable breakup, and this does not move her.
A moral reading of this novel will lead us unto numerous questions and protestations; who does nobody bother over Ruzena’s death, save for her scorned lover for whom she had no feelings for? Each character merely offers their surprise over the happening as though they had merely read of it in the news. Following the scene in which Frantisek demands to be arrested, we know not of what happened to him. He promised Ruzena that if she took the baby's life that he would then take his own. Now, what will he do now that both mother and child are gone? Perhaps the pathetic clinger has go on to kill himself as well.
Olga remembers Jakub showing her his poison tablet, and she brings this detail to Dr. Skreta’s attention once the inspector leaves, but Dr. Skreta denies that he gave him such a thing. She knows she will never inform on him. But yet her thoughts are devoted to the murdered, not to whom has been murdered. Bertlef remarked, while explaining his evidence to the inspector for freeing her from the charge that it was a suicide, that she was boxed into her dreadful life, with a hanger-on who loved her whom she did not love, and a man she admired who did not love her. The baby was only her ploy to bind Klima to her. She had nothing else.
Following her death, there is a sense of liberation and celebration all around. Klima has been freed from fate’s torment. Kalima had been given a taste of what she saw in Jakub as "a real man,” and given a sense of adventure and a taste of infidelity through the film crew's subtle embraces. She seems to no longer love nor worry over her husband and his affairs. Jakub is free to emigrate as he had always dreamed of, witnessing before his departure the enlightening marvel of unrivaled beauty in Kalima. Dr. Skreta was adopted by Bertlef and thus given American citizenship and the liberty to travel more freely, and both of their wives arrived on the same train. Olga was freed from her sorrow and her feelings for Jakub. Nobody mourned. Everybody celebrated.
When we read a novel, we expect that all the questions we have asked throughout the course of our reading will be answered on or before its conclusion. Kundera confronts us with the truth that even the novel, the divine historic record of human experience, is unable to explain all of life’s mysteries. What of that blue light both Klima and Ruzena saw in Bertlef’s apartment? Was its radiant glimmer meant to foreshadow Ruzena’s forthcoming encounter with that divine overwhelming light of the afterlife, a mysterious shining from the blue halo she would soon wear in death? What of Frantisek? Has he gone on to take his own life? What course does Kalima’s relationship with her husband navigate following her disenchantment by the elegant words of Jakub? Will Jakub ever learn that he is, in fact, responsible for Ruzena’s death, that the pill was indeed poison? Is Dr. Skreta really inseminating his every patient with his own sperm, and are the children who resemble the doctor really his? We must humble ourselves and become reconciled to the tragic fact that a great deal of our questions, whether it regard this novel or life as we know it, will remain, until the end, unanswered.