Immortality

Immortality Review

Kundera is sitting by a swimming pool in Paris, watching a swimming instructor, when an older woman finishes her lesson and waves goodbye to the instructor with a gesture of such particular, individual vivacity — girlish, warm, entirely characteristic — that the gesture seems to contain an entire personality, an entire life. Kundera thinks: I will write a novel about that woman. Her name will be Agnes. This incident, which may or may not be autobiographical, is reported in the novel’s opening pages, and the author appears as a character throughout. It is a demonstration rather than a confession: Kundera is showing the reader how the imagination works, how fiction is made from the observation of gestures.

The gesture — as the minimal unit of selfhood, the movement that cannot be faked, that contains what a person is before they have decided what to say — is the novel’s central preoccupation. Agnes has inherited her gesture from her mother, which means that the gesture she uses to express her unique individuality is not exclusively hers. Identity, Kundera proposes, is a set of gestures we inherit, modify slightly, and pass on — and what we call the self is less original than we believe.

The novel’s historical strand follows Goethe and Bettina von Arnim: Bettina, who attached herself to the aging Goethe and after his death published a creative reconstruction of their correspondence, effectively replaced the real Goethe with her version of him. Goethe’s image, the one that entered literary history, is largely Bettina’s invention. This is Kundera’s model for immortality: not the survival of the person but the takeover of the image by someone else’s narrative. The living Goethe and the immortal Goethe are different entities, and the immortal one is not under the living one’s control.

The meditation extends to modern celebrity — a sphere the novel approaches obliquely through Agnes’s sister Laura, who desires attention and cannot stop performing her own life for an imagined audience. In Laura, Kundera anatomizes the logic of modern image-culture decades before it became the dominant mode of self-presentation: the person who is so concerned with how they appear that the appearance has consumed the reality, who mistakes the image for the self because the image is what receives response.

Agnes and the Gesture Inherited

The gesture that launches the novel — the wave of an older woman to her swimming instructor, girlish and warm and entirely characteristic — is Kundera’s philosophical starting point, but it becomes more interesting as the novel develops its implications. Agnes, the character who inherits that gesture in Kundera’s imagination, has herself inherited her characteristic wave from her mother. The gesture she uses to express her unique, irreducible self is not uniquely hers. Identity, the novel proposes, is more borrowed than we acknowledge — a set of behaviours we receive, modify slightly, and transmit.

This has consequences for the novel’s central subject: immortality. If identity is a set of gestures, and gestures can be inherited and passed on, then the question of what survives a life becomes complicated. Goethe’s immortality — his persistence in cultural memory, in critical interpretation, in quotation and reference — is not his survival but the survival of an image that Bettina von Arnim substantially constructed and that subsequent centuries have elaborated. The real Goethe, the man who was bored at breakfast and difficult about his son, is largely lost.

Laura and the Age of Image

Agnes’s sister Laura is the novel’s most contemporary figure — someone so absorbed in her own performance that she can no longer distinguish between her experience and the image of her experience. She seeks attention not for what she has done or thought but for the fact of her own existence, a desire that the novel presents as both understandable and corrosive. Kundera was writing in 1990, a decade before social media gave Laura’s pathology a global infrastructure.

The novel’s self-reflexive dimension — the author appearing as a character, discussing the novel’s construction with a friend — is not merely a clever formal device but a philosophical argument. Kundera is demonstrating that the writer, too, creates images rather than capturing people; that Agnes, once conceived, is no longer under his control but takes on the independent life of any image. Immortality is Kundera’s most explicitly self-conscious novel and also his last written in Czech, marking a transition point in his career.

Huxley’s Company

The title of the novel participates in a literary conversation: Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, published in 1939, follows a millionaire’s pursuit of biological immortality to grotesque conclusions. Kundera’s immortality is not biological but cultural, not the extension of the body but the persistence of the image — a distinction that makes his treatment more disturbing rather than less. The body at least ends. The image goes on, uncontrolled, misrepresenting the person it supposedly preserves.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Kundera’s most philosophically adventurous novel, and the one that most explicitly examines its own construction — a meditation on fame and selfhood that feels more contemporary now than when it was written.

The Borrowed Gesture

Immortality (1990) was the last novel Kundera wrote in Czech. It famously begins with a gesture — an ageing woman’s wave by a swimming pool, borrowed unknowingly from a younger life — which sets off a meditation on identity, image and the human longing to outlast death, drawing real figures such as Goethe into its essayistic play.