He died one morning while lifting weights. When I lift them myself, I keep anxiously checking my pulse, and I am afraid of dropping dead, for to die with a weight in my hand like my revered author would make me an epigone so unbelievable, frenetic and fanatical as immediately to assure me of ridiculous immortality. Several of its leading characters, like Goethe and Hemingway no less, are already dead. Many others are killed, among them the protagonist, a woman named Agnes, who dies in a car crash after swerving to avoid a would-be suicide. Though typical enough of Mr. Kundera, the fact and consequences of Agnes's death are reported long before its details.
Immortality means eternal trial.
Yet despite its preoccupation with death, Mr. Kundera's novel, beautifully translated from the Czech by Peter Kussi, who teaches Slavic languages and literature at Columbia University, is never somber. Even Agnes springs from a gesture that the author once noticed while sitting beside the swimming pool at his health club in Paris. At the time, that gesture aroused in me immense, inexplicable nostalgia, and this nostalgia gave birth to the woman I call Agnes. So not even the death of Agnes disturbs the reader greatly. Such paradoxes multiply throughout.