Immortal

Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-06-01
Features: Immortality is one of the important representative novels written by Milan Kundera after he moved to France in 1990, and it is also his sixth novel. Like Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the protagonist of this book, Agnes, is trapped in a state of helplessness in the existence of life due to the long entanglement of memories from the past. The story begins with a scene where a person waves a greeting to a swimming coach by the swimming pool, concisely reflecting Kundera's exquisite creative talent in the art of fiction. In the book, Kundera says, "Immortality is the shadow or sibling of death; seeing him is seeing her." This book discusses immortality through the medium of a novel, rather than in a philosophical manner. His definition of immortality is also very simple: for immortality, people are unequal. It is necessary to distinguish between small immortality and great immortality. Small immortality refers to the memories a person leaves behind in the hearts of those who know them; great immortality refers to the memories a person leaves behind in the hearts of those who do not know them. Goethe's talk of immortality has nothing to do with the immortality of the soul. This is a different kind of worldly immortality, referring to the immortality of those who remain in the memory of later generations after death. Anyone can achieve this kind of immortality with varying degrees of greatness and different lengths of time, and everyone can have this aspiration from their youth. In my childhood, I often wandered around a Moravian village every Sunday; it is said that the village headman kept an open coffin in his living room, and at moments when he felt particularly satisfied with himself, he would lie in the coffin and imagine his own funeral. The most beautiful moments of his life were undoubtedly lying in the coffin and dreaming: in this way, he lived in his immortality.