A Plunge into Fancies

By Paul Gray

IMMORTALITY by Milan Kundera

Translated by Peter Kussi; Grove Weidenfeld; 345 pages; $21.95

Not everyone will be pleased to hear that a character named Mr. Kundera moves through the pages of this novel. Even more dispiriting, this Mr. Kundera is an author, and the book he is writing turns out to be the very one that readers of Immortality will hold in their hands. What the world scarcely needs at this moment is more self-referential fiction. The postmodernist point that art is, um, artificial has probably sunk in by now and does not require further demonstrations.

But the Kundera character does display some disarming modesty. He admits that novels, of whatever sort, are not in much demand except as fodder: "The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs, or cartoons." Therefore, "if a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold." The person to whom he is talking responds, "When I hear you, I just hope that your novel won't turn out to be a bore."

It decidedly does not. Immortality is every bit as gripping and exhilarating as The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), the two novels that made Kundera, an exiled Czech who has lived in Paris since 1975, famous in the West. Like its predecessors, Immortality swings easily, almost imperceptibly, from narrative to rumination and back again, collapsing the distinction between action and concepts. Kundera's characters must cope with their emotions and with the stresses of daily life in contemporary Paris; but they also embody, sometimes consciously and sometimes by example, a number of nagging problems of existence. What does it mean to be a person in the waning years of the 20th century? If images have become reality and if people lack the power to control how they are perceived by others, what happens to the notion of the unique, inviolable self?

Agnes loves Paul, her husband of some 20 years, and her teenage daughter Brigitte. But she has also begun to experience an eerie sense of distance from people, including those closest to her: "The feeling that she had nothing in common with those two-legged creatures with a head on their shoulders and a mouth in their face." Agnes has a recurrent fantasy: a man from another universe visits her and Paul and asks them if they want to spend eternity together or go their separate ways. She realizes that she cannot answer the question honestly as long as her husband is present.

These cerebral anxieties are counterbalanced by the physical turmoils of Laura, Agnes' younger sister, who has plunged into a passionate love affair with Bernard, a radio journalist eight years her junior. But after months of mutual bliss, Bernard abruptly becomes detached and preoccupied. Laura, growing frantic, assumes that she is being supplanted by another woman. Bernard is ashamed to tell her the real reason for his dwindling ardor: the appearance at his radio station of a stranger who gives him a diploma-like document, handsomely executed and lettered, that reads, "Bernard Bertrand is hereby declared a Complete Ass." This bit of malevolence unhinges him because it makes him realize that many people, perhaps all of Paris, may have the same unflattering opinion of him and that there is no way he can change or escape the judgment.

The permutations of Agnes and Paul and Laura and Bernard are complex and entertaining; they trace the pattern of a conventional novel, with causes leading to effects, including the violent death of one of the four. This story could be filmed, as was The Unbearable Lightness of Being, although much would have to be simplified and unscrambled. The distinguishing characteristic of Immortality, however, is its refusal to acknowledge any distinction between basic plot and the voluminous speculations that a given action seems capable of prompting. The book possesses a vertiginous sweep of perspectives from the intimate to the Olympian, along with a sometimes comic eagerness to explain not only what happens to its characters but also the evolution of Western culture and the meaning of life itself.

The central problem, which Kundera treats both seriously and playfully, is the concept of individuality. Billions of people have walked the earth, but the number of ideas, physiognomies and physical mannerisms on which they could draw has in theory been much smaller. Therefore, interpreting the inner truth of people on the basis of how they look or act is suspect: "A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations."

Anything can happen, or crop up, in a novel that allows itself to plunge into such fancies. That is why there is a scene in which Goethe and Ernest Hemingway meet in heaven to discuss their posthumous reputations. It also explains the frequent eruptions of presumably irrelevant aphorisms: "I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches." Or "Music: a pump for inflating the soul."

Out of a story about contemporary neuroses, Kundera has fabricated a context in which everything, literally, can be claimed to matter. What is more, the author indulges this obsessiveness without ever droning or turning out a dull page. In its inventiveness and its dazzling display of what written words can convey, Immortality gives fiction back its good name.